27 Dec. 2001 - 2 Jan. 2002
Issue No.566
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 27 Dec. 2001 - 2 Jan. 2002 Issue No.566 |
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The uses and abuses of comparison
Why set Egypt against South Korea? Roger Owen* offers alternatives
One of many kinds of fall-out from September attacks was a spate of articles with titles like "Getting at the roots of Arab poverty" and "The economic failure of Islam." Sometimes focused on the Middle East, sometimes on parts of the larger Muslim world, their ostensible purpose is to explain to a Western audience how it is that poverty contributes to violence. But it is difficult not to see them as also part of the age-old polemic against the religion of Islam itself.
Central to such undertakings is the use of international comparison. Economic league tables are produced to show that the recent economic performance of the Arab countries, or the Muslim countries, lags not only behind the West but also behind what Bernard Lewis described in a recent New Yorker article as the "more recent recruits to Western-style modernity such as Korea, Taiwan and Singapore." Comparisons of this type also draw on a much larger literature produced by the World Bank and many other international economic analysts, which use much the same technique to exhort the states of the region now referred to as MENA (Middle East and North Africa) to ape the liberalising policies of a few of the more successful countries of the non-European world.
If such comparisons are to make sense, however, we need to know what is being compared with what, and why. If not, to use a common expression, you run the risk of comparing two quite disparate entities, say apples with oranges. And what is the point of that except, perhaps, as an exercise in taste?
Even the briefest of surveys of the literature on the subject reveals at least three ways in which this basic requirement is usually avoided. First, there is a remarkable amount of imprecision about what the Middle East, or the Arab or Muslim, world consists of. In the New York Times article on "Getting at the roots of Arab poverty" just mentioned, the examples of alleged economic failure are drawn promiscuously from the Arab countries, Muslim countries and, in one case, sub-Saharan Africa. But many more academic studies fall into the same trap, with MENA sometimes defined to include the oil-producing states of the Gulf and sometimes not, while at almost all times it implicitly excludes the pariah states, Libya, Sudan and Iraq, without ever explicitly saying why.
Second, the purpose of comparing this somewhat imprecisely defined region with some other region of the world is rarely explained. What, for example, does Egypt have in common with South Korea in terms of economic structure, institutions or resources that make them comparable in any way? And why is the Middle East never compared with regions than which it has performed much better in recent decades, like sub-Saharan Africa, or at least as well, like South Asia? They are its closest non- European neighbours after all.
The third failing concerns the use of the time period being used. This has two aspects. One is internal to the region itself. The present statistical wisdom about the Middle East is that its economies performed well in the mid- 1970s, very badly in the 1980s and slightly better in first half of the 1990s. But this, as everyone knows, was largely the result of changes in the price of oil, which peaked round about 1980, and by somewhat better economic management from the period of the Gulf War on. Does this make the 1970s a good bench-mark for judging subsequent performance? And, if not, when can we say that the Middle East was performing normally, as a prelude to trying to work out how much has it advanced, or perhaps declined, since then?
The same point relates to cross-regional comparisons as well. Clearly the global environment experienced radical changes over time. As far as the Middle East was concerned, the oil price rises of the 1970s provided a huge expansion of opportunity, only part of which was made good use of. In contrast, the 1990s were an unusually difficult time for Middle Eastern states which were seriously committed to programmes of structural adjustment. The re- emergence of the Eastern European market economies, the intensification of competition for global markets and the fact that the big multinationals were no longer looking for countries with cheap labour in which to invest but for those with an educated, reliable labour force meant that the great bulk of trade and capital flowed between the already developed countries, leaving the rest to scramble for a few bones thrown from this rich table.
If useful international comparison is so difficult, does this mean that it ought, in an ideal world, to be abandoned entirely? Here the answer must clearly be no. The tool itself is central to the practice of economics. It is also a vital part of the economic historian's search for the answer to the ever-elusive question of why economies grow, and why some grow faster than the others.
Nevertheless, if my arguments so far are correct, it should be clear that the first requirement for a good set of international comparisons is a clear statement of purpose as to what is being compared to what, and why. For the rest, there are a number of often-used approaches which seem most promising. One is a set of single-country historical comparisons designed to draw helpful lessons, for example, from a contrast between problems faced, or neglected, in the past and those today. One obvious example from recent Egyptian history is that although the country experienced something of a "green revolution" between 1890 and 1914, there has been a constant refusal to evaluate the best use of the limited area of fertile soil and the optimal units for cultivating it most efficiently.
A second approach involves intra-regional comparisons between different Middle Eastern policies and policy outcomes, for instance ones designed to throw more light on possible future trajectories or with the problems associated with privatisation or with preventing increasing inequalities of domestic income. Over time, Egypt's business community may wish to be allowed to emulated their Turkish colleagues' ability to own media companies or create private universities. Right now, those responsible for managing its economic performance can take some small comfort from their success in privatising a much larger proportion of the state-owned enterprises on their list than Turkey or Israel, and that the distribution of income in Egypt is far less inequitable than in either of the other two.
A more utopian suggestion would be to split the MENA region in half from a statistical point of view in order to concentrate most attention on the comparative performance of the Maghreb countries plus Egypt. The rationale would be the similarity of structure between the Egyptian, Tunisian and Moroccan economies and their similar attempts to liberalise and to create a working relationship with Europe, which not only makes comparisons with similar regions useful but also poses the larger, vital question of whether or to what extent they can catch up with some of their northern Mediterranean neighbours. For the rest, the economies of the non-oil Arab countries to the east of Suez appear too heterogeneous, too affected by the Israeli/Palestinian conflict or the continued sanctioning of Iraq, to constitute a viable unit for helpful analysis.
A last, and even more radical, suggestion might be to ask the governments and peoples of the MENA region to what they would like their economic performances compared. Few, I imagine, would see much point in a comparison with Singapore or South Korea. But Syria could well find advantages in being compared with Egypt, which it aspires to emulate. And Egypt? It would be most instructive to hear the answer.
* The writer is director of the Arab Contemporary Studies Programme at Harvard University.
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