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People in the West tend to think about oil shocks from the perspective of the consumer. They notice when prices go up. The price spikes in 1973 and 1979 triggered by boycotts by oil producers are etched in their collective consciousness, as price controls left Americans lining up for gas and European governments imposed weekend driving bans. This was more than an economic shock. The balance of power in the world economy seemed to be shifting from the developed to the developing world.

If a surge in fossil fuel prices rearranges the world economy, the effect also operates in reverse. For the vast majority of countries in the world, the decline in oil prices is a boon. Among emerging markets, Indonesia, Philippines, India, Argentina, Turkey, and South Africa all benefit, as imported fuel is a big part of their import bill. Cheaper energy will cushion the pain of the COVID-19 recession. But at the same time, and by the same token, plunging oil prices deliver a concentrated and devastating shock to the producers. By comparison with the diffuse benefit enjoyed by consumers, the producers suffer immediate immiseration.

In inflation-adjusted terms, oil prices are similar to those last seen in the 1950s, when the Persian Gulf states were little more than clients of the oil majors, the United States and the British Empire

The program has the ambitious objective of reducing the role of state-owned enterprises—in which the IMF includes military-owned companies—and encouraging their replacement with “inclusive private sector led growth.” Indeed, Egypt’s Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly called for just that last year, saying he is aiming for the share of private investment in Egypt’s economy to rise from 30 percent to 65 percent in the coming three years. However, when one examines the market conditions in Egypt and globally, it becomes clear that such an expansion of private investment is clearly unrealistic.

a massive parallel market for hard currency emerged, with its own exchange rate. The parallel market even operated internationally, with Egyptian expatriate workers paying their Saudi rials or Kuwaiti dinars to dealers in the countries where they worked, who then had partners in Egypt who would disburse Egyptian pounds to awaiting relatives at the black-market rate. In 2015, before new reforms were introduced, the central bank governor at the time Hisham Ramez estimated that as much as 90 percent of Egypt’s remittances were being lost to the parallel market, circumventing the country’s official banking system and starving banks of much needed hard currency liquidity. For perspective on the seriousness of this issue, remittances in recent years have brought more dollars to Egypt than Suez Canal revenue, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), and tourism combined.

Inflation already pushed past 20 percent last month and this is only the beginning of a year or more of price corrections as markets absorb the latest dramatic devaluation of the country’s currency. While in 2016 and 2017 consumers cut back on beef and chicken, replacing them with eggs as a source of protein and fats, eggs today are too expensive for many, leading the government to encourage the consumption of chicken legs.

In February, OPEC called for an oil production “freeze” to raise crude prices in conjunction with Russia. But this effort collapsed at a meeting in Doha, Qatar, in April when Iran refused to join any freeze in order to regain the pre-2012 production levels of close to 4 mbpd it enjoyed before U.S. and European Union nuclear sanctions were imposed, following the removal of certain sanctions after the 2015 nuclear deal. A similar proposal failed at the OPEC meeting in June, again following Iran’s refusal, despite outreach by the Qataris.

OPEC again called for a form of output cut on Sept. 28 at an extraordinary meeting in Algiers. Markets bit on the news, with Brent prices rising sharply by about 15 percent in the following week, from $46 to $52 per barrel.

Can action by the cartel sustain higher crude prices over the long term? Probably not. Like a desert mirage, the image of an OPEC resurrection vanishes when approached.

In Sudan, the revolutionaries who overthrew President Omar al-Bashir and who continue to organise are well aware of the threat posed by neighbouring Arab countries. Protesters’ murals show the people rejecting the interfering hands of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). One of the most popular chants is “Victory or Egypt”, voicing activists’ determination not to succumb to a military counter-revolution as happened in their northern neighbour.

many Sudanese believe that the 3 June crackdown in which scores of protesters were killed only came after the green light from Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt

In this struggle between the “Pax Africana” and Arab authoritarians, there’s no doubt that the democrats have the weaker hand. But not everything is going the Arab troika’s way.

Like Western investors, the kingdom’s elites are uncertain about what the new order means for the country’s economy. The new Saudi leadership has indeed created new opportunities, but many of the deep structural barriers to diversification remain unchanged. The bulk of the public sector remains bloated by patronage employment, the private sector is still dominated by cheap foreign labor, and private economic activity remains deeply dependent on state spending. Addressing these challenges could take a generation — and it will require patience, creativity, and a clearer sense of priorities.

While a band of Al Saud brothers used to rule collectively with the king as a figurehead, decision-making has now become centralized under one man

ruthlessness and willingness to take risks radically at odds with the cautious and consensual political culture of the Al Saud clan

A trove of emails, documents and legal filings reviewed by Bloomberg News, as well as interviews with former insiders, reveal the extent of the services Rowland and his private bank provided to one of its biggest customers, Mohammed bin Zayed, better known as MBZ, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates. Some of the work went beyond financial advice. It included scouting for deals in Zimbabwe, setting up a company to buy the image rights of players on the Abu Dhabi-owned Manchester City Football Club and helping place the bank’s chairman at the time on the board of Human Rights Watch after it published reports critical of the Persian Gulf country.

a 2017 plan devised by the bank for an assault on the financial markets of Qatar, a country that had just been blockaded by the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Bahrain for allegedly sponsoring terrorism

a coordinated attack to deplete Qatar’s foreign-exchange reserves and pauperize its government

Hundreds of Egyptian bakery owners on Saturday blocked Cairo's Qasr Al-Aini Street near the Ministry of Supply and Internal Trade to protest government plans to reduce flour subsidies.  On Thursday, the supply ministry announced that it would continue to subsidise bread loaves, but not flour – which would henceforth be sold to bakeries at market prices. The move means that prices paid by bakeries for a 100-kilogram bag of flour would rise from LE16 to LE286.

The government will then purchase loaves of bread from bakeries for 34 piastres each before selling them on to consumers at 5 piastres each. 

"We have long called for the liberalisation of flour prices and the entire system of bread production," Ghorab added. "But with its latest decision, the government is setting an unrealistic production cost."

Syrians have shown relentless ingenuity in adapting to every stage of a horrendous conflict, salvaging remnants of dignity, solidarity and vitality amid nightmarish circumstances

The decimation of Syria’s male population represents, arguably, the most fundamental shift in the country’s social fabric. As a generation of men has been pared down by death, disability, forced displacement and disappearance, those who remain have largely been sucked into a violent and corrupting system centered around armed factions

80 of the village’s men have been killed and 130 wounded—amounting to a third of the male population aged 18-50. The remaining two-thirds have overwhelmingly been absorbed into the army or militias

This note will briefly outline the notion of an Arab “variety of capitalism” characterized by the central role of a distributive state whose interventions lead to a deep, and at least in parts unintended, segmentation of business and labour markets into insiders and outsiders. It will explain how this model has led to economic stagnation and contributed to the uprisings of 2011 as well as how it has hobbled economic adjustment after the uprisings, both under anciens and new regimes. Its pessimistic conclusion is that distributional institutions in most Arab countries remain very sticky, having created powerful vested interests not only in business but also in society at large that undermine the negotiation of a new “social contract” – a concept that many are talking about but no one seems to be able to map out in any detail.

Authoritarian-populist republics like Algeria, Egypt, (pre-war) Syria and Tunisia have achieved particularly good human development scores considering their modest levels of wealth (figure 3).

While Arab governments’ ambition to provide might have led to solid coverage of basic services, most Arab states have pledged much wider material guarantees to their citizens – typically beyond their fiscal and administrative capacity, especially once economic growth started stalling in the 1970s. The result has been a rigid insider-outsider division in which some benefit from Arab governments’ relative generosity while others remain excluded.

on November 5, 1990, Rabbi Meir Kahane was assassinated in New York City, a seminal event in the annals of American and Israeli history. Years after his death, Kahane’s killing is considered the first terror attack of the group that would later coalesce into al-Qaeda.

Kahane had spent the previous 22 years calling for Israel’s parliament to be dissolved and replaced with rabbinic rule over a Jewish theocracy, based on the strictest interpretations of the Torah and Talmud. He openly incited the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians—and all other non-Jews who refused to accept unvarnished apartheid—from Israel and the territories it occupied. He outdid all other Israeli eliminationists with his insistence that killing those he identified as Israel’s enemies was not only a strategic necessity, but an act of worship.[1] His ideology continues to resonate: In the September 2019 elections to Israel’s parliament the explicitly Kahanist Jewish Power Party (Otzma Yehudit) got 83,609 votes, putting it in tenth place in a crowded field of over 30 parties.

The victims of JDL-linked terrorist attacks in the United States were usually innocent bystanders: the drummer in a rock band who lost a leg when a bomb blew up the Long Island home of an alleged Nazi war criminal; the Boston cop who was seriously injured during his attempt to dispose of another bomb intended for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee; the elderly lady who died of smoke inhalation in her Brooklyn flat above a Lebanese restaurant torched after its owners were accused of sympathies with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO); the young Jewish secretary who was asphyxiated when another fire burned through the Manhattan office of a talent agency that promoted performances of Soviet ballet troupes.

Guided by the twin logics of energy security and energy independence, American actions and alliances in region became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The very thing the United States sought to eliminate in the Middle East—insecurity—became a major consequence of America’s growing and increasingly militarized entanglement.

In effect, the essential relationship of dependency between the United States and the Middle East has never been “oil for security.” It has in fact been oil for insecurity, a dynamic in which war, militarization and autocracy in the region have been entangled with the economic dominance of North Atlantic oil companies, US hegemony and discourses of energy security.

Oil’s violent geopolitics is often assumed to result from the immense power its natural scarcity affords to those who can control it. Recent developments in global hydrocarbon markets, which saw negative prices on April 20, 2020 have once again put this scarcity myth to bed

a solar mega-project that is supposedly going to end Morocco's dependency on energy imports, provide electricity to more than a million Moroccans, and put the country on a “green path.”

This analysis examines the project through the lens of the creation of a new commodity chain, revealing its effects as no different from the destructive mining activities taking place in southern Morocco.

What seems to unite all the reports and articles written about the solar plant is a deeply erroneous assumption that any move toward renewable energy is to be welcomed. And that any shift from fossil fuels, regardless of how it is carried out, will help us to avert climate chaos. One needs to say it clearly from the start: the climate crisis we are currently facing is not attributable to fossil fuels per se, but rather to their unsustainable and destructive use in order to fuel the capitalist machine. In other words, capitalism is the culprit, and if we are serious in our endeavors to tackle the climate crisis (only one facet of the multi-dimensional crisis of capitalism), we cannot elude questions of radically changing our ways of producing and distributing things, our consumption patterns and fundamental issues of equity and justice. It follows from this that a mere shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, while remaining in the capitalist framework of commodifying and privatizing nature for the profits of the few, will not solve the problem. In fact, if we continue down this path we will only end up exacerbating, or creating another set of problems, around issues of ownership of land and natural resources.

Western-produced surveillance technology sold to one authoritarian government became an investigative tool of choice to gather information about political dissidents -- and silence them

“The technology is becoming very sophisticated, and the only thing limiting it is how deeply governments want to snoop into lives,” says Rob Faris, research director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Surveillance is typically a state secret, and we only get bits and pieces that leak out.” Some industry insiders now say their own products have become dangerous in the hands of regimes where law enforcement crosses the line to repression.

Across the Middle East in recent years, sales teams at Siemens, Nokia Siemens, Munich-based Trovicor and other companies have worked their connections among spy masters, police chiefs and military officers to provide country after country with monitoring gear, industry executives say. Their story is a window into a secretive world of surveillance businesses that is transforming the political and social fabric of countries from North Africa to the Persian Gulf. Monitoring centers, as the systems are called, are sold around the globe by these companies and their competitors, such as Israel-based Nice Systems Ltd. (NICE), and Verint Systems Inc. (VRNT), headquartered in Melville, New York. They form the heart of so- called lawful interception surveillance systems. The equipment is marketed largely to law enforcement agencies tracking terrorists and other criminals. The toolbox allows more than the interception of phone calls, e-mails, text messages and Voice Over Internet Protocol calls such as those made using Skype. Some products can also secretly activate laptop webcams or microphones on mobile devices. They can change the contents of written communications in mid-transmission, use voice recognition to scan phone networks, and pinpoint people’s locations through their mobile phones. The monitoring systems can scan communications for key words or recognize voices and then feed the data and recordings to operators at government agencies.

Protests over unemployment spread from Oman's capital to provincial cities Salalah and Sur on Monday with a number of arrests reported.Facing growing unrest over high unemployment among young Omanis, the government moved on Sunday to pledge job creation plans and to restrict employment of expat labour in a country where the vast majority of private sector jobs go to foreign workers.

The protests followed a government statement on Sunday reaffirming plans to increase job creation for nationals by 25,000 over the next six months.A separate announcement by the minister of manpower, Abdullah bin Nasser al-Bakri, stated that the recruitment of expatriate labour to certain professions would be restricted for the next six months to encourage recruitment of local jobseekers

unemployment in 2016 stood at 18 percent

many of the non-oil exporting nations in the Middle East and North Africa are undergoing a process of redefinition of how they are linked with the global economy. It is not going well.

Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Jordan are becoming more dependent on external borrowing than on foreign direct investments compared to the pre-2008 period. This is visible with declining ratios of FDIs to GDP, in contrast with increasing ratios of foreign debt to GDP and total exports

The relative political stabilization in all four countries as of 2014/2015 did not allow them much room for full-fledged recovery due to the global economic slowdown. This made it harder for all of them to achieve export-led growth and attract FDI, leaving them with foreign borrowing as the only viable option. Foreign debt accounts for much of the apparent recovery, as expressed in growth rates.

The Saudi government’s new “instant visa” fast tracks the process of hiring foreign workers for nascent firms, and is accompanied by a one-year grace period on Saudization requirements. Coming in the wake of aggressive moves to limit job opportunities for migrants, including sector-wide bans on the employment of migrant workers, the new policy highlights the challenges of striking the right balance between creating jobs for Saudis and supporting Saudi businesses. The debate is hindered by fundamental analytical errors that proponents of each side make when arguing their case.

Decades of providing Saudi businesses with an inexhaustible supply of low-cost workers has made them into primitive enterprises: their business model scarcely develops beyond importing foreign goods, putting low-cost foreign hands to work, having a couple of Saudi overseers—usually the establishment’s proprietors—and reselling the imported goods domestically with minimal value added.

Counterintuitively, a key flaw in this commercial model is its ability to effortlessly adapt to changes in the economic climate. When business is booming, new workers can be hired instantly at exactly the same wage as before. And when the economy contracts, such as when oil prices fall, the migrant workers on the company’s books are made redundant at the stroke of a pen, stabilizing the firm’s finances. In both cases, managers fixate on migrant workers as the primary control variable, at the expense of considerations relating to productivity and innovation.

Like other Gulf states, Oman does not grant citizens freedom of expression or the right to choose their leader, but it does provide citizens a range of material advantages: public sector jobs, subsidies, free health care and education, a free plot of land, a pension and no income tax.

Oman’s public debt has skyrocketed since oil prices declined in 2014, going from less than 5% of Oman's gross domestic product to nearly 60% last year. Until 2023, annual budgets were already expected to be in the red. But the 2020 fiscal deficit is expected to be four times higher than previously forecasted because of the double shock of the COVID-19 pandemic and plunging oil prices, credit rating agency Fitch estimated.

the cash-strapped Omani government is expected to cut down on public expenditures and impose austerity measures. But such a move would revamp the model of governance that has prevailed since the late Qaboos bin Said ascended to the throne in 1970

thisarticle highlights three distinct mythologies (economic miracle, democraticgradualism and secularism) about Tunisia that prevented a clearer understandingof the political and socio-economic situation

studies of Arab politics haveswung between the democratization paradigm and the authoritarian resilience one.Both certainly captured important aspects of the political developments taking placein the Arab world over the last two decades and to an extent still do, but, at the sametime, missed equally significant changes that, if identified earlier, might havecontributed to lessen the surprise of the Arab Spring. Specifically, the contentionhere is that both paradigms tended to focus too strongly on what was visible andreadily identifiable at the level of the state and state – society relations, but did notaccount for important unintended consequences that were occurring and diffusing inwider society as well as for less visible socio-political phenomena because they werepartially trapped in the mythology served up by the Ben Ali regime. What this meansis that both paradigms operated from similar mythologies about Tunisia, while, atthe same time, drawing very different conclusions about them

unintended consequences have animpact on the regime because the reforms it initiates have surprising effects that itneeds to deal with, but, interestingly, they also have an impact on scholars whosetheoretical tools might need sharpening in light of the occurrence of events thatcontradict what seemed to be valid theoretical assumptions

With every flood or bout of extreme heat or cold, the jihadists would reappear, often supplementing their sales pitches with gifts. When a particularly vicious drought struck in 2010, the fifth in seven years, they doled out food baskets. When fierce winds eviscerated hundreds of eggplant fields near Kirkuk in the spring of 2012, they distributed cash. As farming communities limped from one debilitating crisis to another, the recruiters—all members of what soon became the Islamic State—began to see a return on their investment.

By the time the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) seized this swath of Iraq—along with most of the country’s west and north—in a brutal summer-long blitzkrieg in 2014, few locals were surprised to see dozens of former fertilizer market regulars among its ranks.

ISIS appears to have attracted much more support from water-deprived communities than from their better-resourced peers