After the Arab Spring: creating economic commons

Oxford, United Kingdom - If the latest Arab awakening was about jobs and justice, then political reforms, unless accompanied with a levelling of the economic playing field, are unlikely to be sufficient on their own. The latent demographic pressures across the Arab world and the resulting youth unemployment have created an employment challenge that is both real and urgent.

During the next decade, an estimated 100 million jobs need to be created in the Middle East. The public sector, already bloated and inefficient, is unprepared to meet this employment challenge. Sooner or later, Arab policymakers will have to return to addressing a longstanding development challenge facing the region: economic diversification.

In fact, the challenges of demography and diversification are intertwined. Without developing a robust private sector and without reducing the region's dependence on natural resources, the gains that the Arab world has made in literacy and health cannot be translated into lasting economic prosperity.

The need for diversification has been long realised in the Middle East, at least in official speeches and policy documents. But, apart from partial success stories in Oman and Bahrain, diversification has remained merely an aspiration on paper. Now, it has acquired a new urgency against the backdrop of the latest political upheavals. The crucial question is: what has prevented the emergence of a strong private sector and why has diversification been so difficult to achieve?

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There is a huge population problem. Under the dictatorships, because of a lack of women's rights and other freedoms, families were having on average 4-5 children. Which in turn led to these uprisings, because a large number of the young adults did not have jobs.