'Trade, Investment, and Development in the Middle East and North Africa: Engaging with the World' describes why expanding trade and investment is vital for this region. The greatest economic challenge is to create enough jobs for its rapidly growing labor force, which is increasingly young and educated, to ward off threats to social and political stability inherent in high unemployment rates. This effort requires higher, and more sustainable, economic growth than has been achieved in the past two decades. Expanding trade and private investment offers the best hope. The potential is enormous...

The countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have been recovering from the global financial crisis, but the recent political turmoil has interrupted the pace of credit and output recovery in many countries. The political turmoil in the MENA region reveals deep-seated frustrations and a sense of political, social, and economic exclusion, especially among the youth. The relatively weak growth performance reflects a combination of insufficient reforms and weak reform implementation, including financial sector reforms. The structural weaknesses of financial sectors imply that access...

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region is one of the most water stressed regions in the world. Water scarcity has already become a challenge to development in many of the countries. Due to increasing population and Projected climate change impacts, MENA's annual water demand gap is projected to grow five-fold by 2050, from today's 42 Km3 to 200 km3 by 2050. Despite its extreme scarcity, water is managed poorly. Inefficiencies are common in the agriculture, municipal and industrial systems; and many utilities are financially unsustainable. As a result, countries overexploit their...

In the Arab countries, climate change is a risk to poverty reduction and economic growth, threatening to unravel many of the development gains that have been achieved. The Arab Region is already suffering adverse consequences from climate variability and change. This book provides information on climate change and its impact in the Arab Region, as well as technical guidance on climate adaptation options for policy makers. The areas addressed include the economic impacts of climate change (as measured by the reduction in household income and GDP); the impacts of climate change on the water,...

The popular grievances that have fueled the Arab Spring since 2010 demonstrate that past development paradigms have failed to achieve the inclusive and sustainable growth expected by Arab populations. Countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have failed to develop a strong private sector that is linked with global markets, survives without state assistance, and generates productive employment for young people. One key symptom of this maldevelopment is that, with the exception of the petroleum sector, MENA remains the least trade-integrated region in the world. The Deauville...

In the last two decades, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has closed many critical gender gaps, especially in ensuring equal access for girls and boys to education and healthcare. Today, the region can be proud that its women are enrolling in far greater numbers in university than ever before, and indeed, in many countries, young women are more educated than young men. At the same time, MENA has also witnessed the largest decrease in maternal mortality in the world. These achievements are commendable, and the next step is expanding the role of MENA women in the work place and in...

PMThe report aims to meet two broad objectives: (a) enhance knowledge about the current state of existing social safety nets (SSNs) and assess their effectiveness in responding to new and emerging challenges to the poor and vulnerable in the region by bringing together new evidence, data, and country-specific analysis; and (b) open up and inform a debate on feasible policy options to make SSNs in the Middle East and North Africa more effective and innovative. The first chapter, 'a framework for SSN reform,' describes and illustrates the reasons for the region's growing need for SSN reform and...

The report Jobs or Privileges: Unleashing the Employment Potential of the Middle East and North Africa shows that policies that lower competition and create an uneven playing field are common and constrain private sector job creation. These policies take different forms across countries and sectors but share several common features: They limit free entry in the domestic market, exclude certain firms from government programs, increase regulatory burden and uncertainty on the majority of firms, insulate certain firms and sectors from foreign competition, and create incentives that discourage...

This analysis of the Arab Spring aftermath sheds light on the interplay between economic, behavioural, institutional, and political factors that have influenced the transitions across the region and the risk of civil conflict. The study draws on four main bodies of literature on poverty and inequality, subjective well-being, civil conflict, and macroeconomics.