The Social Balance Sheet of Privatization in The Arab Countries: Notes

The Social Balance Sheet of Privatization in The Arab Countries

Ahmed M. Jiyad

Notes:

Volker Perthes, The Syrian Private Industrial and Commercial Sectors and the State, Int. J. Middle East Stud. 24, 1992. pp. 207 -230. Back
Eva Bellin, The Politics of Profit in Tunisia: Utility of the Rentier Paradigm, World Development, Vol. 22, No. 3, 1994. pp. 427-436. Back
Hans Löfgren, Economic Policy in Egypt: A Breakdown in Reform Resistance, Int. J. Middle East Stud. 25, 1993. pp. 407-421. Back
I had briefly outlined these views in my paper on Privatisation and Poverty in the Arab World presented before Hubert H. Humphrey 2nd. Regional Conference on "Approaches to Privatisation: Reality, Dream, or Nightmare" Cairo, Egypt. March 13-17, 1995 Back
This part is heavily quoted from UNCTAD, Final Report of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Comparative Experience with Privatization to the Trade and Development Board, TD/B/40(2)/21 TD/B/WG.3/16, 1994 Back
Mary Shirley, Promoting the Private Sector, Finance & Development. March 1988/Vol. 25/No. 1. pp 40-43 Back
Korkut Boratav, Public Sector, Public intervention and Economic Development: The impact of changing perspectives and policies during the 1980s. UNCTAD Discussion Paper, No. 61. July 1993 Back
AMF, OAPEC & ARAB FUND, The Arab Unified Economic Report-AUER 1992. Table 1/5. p. 277. Back
Countries included are Jordan, Tunisia, Algeria, Sudan, Syria, Somalia, Oman, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, Mauritania, and Yemen. Total debt represent debt outstanding disbursed year end. Figures rounded and based on Arab Monetary Fund, Balance of Payments and External Public Debt of Arab Countries 1981-1991. No. 6. 1992. Tables 23, 38, 48, 58, 63, 64, and 65. Back
Figures were calculated from Peter M. Keller & Nissanke E. Weerasinghe, Multilateral Official Debt Rescheduling: Recent Experience. IMF, Washington D.C., May 1988. Table 1. Back
Agreements includes SBA- Standby arrangement, EFF- Extended Fund Facility; SAF- Structural Adjustment Facility. Source: Walden Bello, Dark Victory: The United States, Structural Adjustment and Global Poverty. Pluto Press, UK. 1994. Appendix 1, pp.130-132 Back
OPEC Bulletin, November/December 1994. p. 54 Back
OPEC Bulletin, November/ December 1991. p. 50 Back
Marsden, Keith and Thérès, Bélot, Private Enterprise in Africa: Creating a Better Environment. The World Bank. 1987. Cited by Nyong. op.cit. p. 125 Back
Candoy-Sekse, Rebecca: Techniques of Privatization of State-Owned Enterprises. Vol. III, Inventory of Country Experience and Reference Materials. The World Bank. 1988. Cited by Nyong. op.cit. p. 125 Back
Shirly, Mary and John Nellis, Public Enterprise Reform: Lessons of Experience EDI Development Studies. The World Bank. 1991. Cited by Nyong. op.cit. p. 125. Boratav. op.cit. p. 33. Back
National Bank of Egypt, The Privatization Programme in the Egyptian Economy, Economic Bulletin. Vol. 46, No. 1/2. 1993. pp. 9-23. Back
OPEC, OPEC Bulletin, Vol XXIII, No. 4, April 1992. P. 40 Back
OPEC, OPEC Bulletin, Vol XXIV, No. 9, October 1993. P. 49. However, the number of the privatized companies according to DGCR is 31 with total capital of $3.5 billion, which is much lower than the figure of 80 cited above. This difference is very significant and wide which require verification. Back
Fred Lawson, ch. 7 and Kiren Aziz Chaudhry, ch. 8 in Iliya Harik & Denis J. Sullivan (eds.) Privatization and Liberalization in the Middle East. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992; Kiren Aziz Chaudhry, Economic Liberalization and the Lineages of the Rentier State, Comparative Politics. Vol. 27, No. 1. October 1994. PP. 1-25; Jean Dréze and Haris Gazdar, Hunger and Poverty in Iraq, World Development, Vol. 20, No. 7. 1992. pp. 921- 945. Back
M. Riad El-Ghonemy, Land, Food and Rural Development in North Africa, IT Publication, London, 1993. p. 54. Back
OPEC Bulletin, February 1993. p. 56. Back
OPEC Bulletin, March 1993. p. 36. Back
OPEC Bulletin, March 1993. p. 38. Back
OPEC Bulletin, March 1994. p. 39. Back
OPEC Bulletin, November/December 1994. p. 55. Back
OPEC Bulletin, March 1995. pp. 40-41. Back
Said El-Naggar, Politics and Economic Reform in Egypt, paper presented to the 19th annual Symposium organized by the Centre for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, Washington D.C., April, 1994 and published in the Norwegian MIDTØSTEN FORUM, Nr. 2, October 1994. pp. 52-53. Back
Hans Löfgren, op.cit. p. 413 Back
Dréze and Gazdar, op.cit. p. 923. Back
Simon Bromley & Ray Bush, Adjustment in Egypt? The Political Economy of Reform, Review of African Political Economy No. 60, 1994. pp. 201 - 213. p. 206. Back
The Wasta, which refers to the act of mediation as well as the person who act as mediator, was the subject of a book under the same title by Robert B. Cunningham & Yasin K. Sarayrah, Wasta: The Hidden Force in Middle Eastern Society. Westport, CT & London: Praeger Publishers. 1993. Reviewed by Eleanor A. Doumato, MESA Bulletin, 28, 1994. pp. 258/9 Back
A Tunisian programme for allowing civil servant to be lent to specific private sector venture in order to help the venture getting through the bureaucracy was created in late 1970s. Eva Bellin, op.cit., p. 429. Back
To prevent such drainage and "Dutch disease" phenomenon the regime in Iraq, for example, resorted to the usual authoritarian and dictatorial procedures by issuing directives preventing such transfer. The Revolution Command Council-RCC had issued Decree No. 200, dated 12/2/1984 according to which any government, public sector, or state owned enterprise employee be sentence for 10 years impresionment without trial if resigned without the approval of his or her office. Ironically this decree is still operational even after the regime had resorted to some drastic triming of the state and privatized many SOEs. However, as we shall see later, the regime was in a way forced to address this issue on the highest political level when the Council of Ministers devoted three sessions to discuss the issue of government officials working outside the working hours in December 1989. Back
For more information and applications of these types of SSNs see the following documents by UNCTAD: Exchange of experience on poverty reduction impacts of social funds and safety nets, including mobilization of domestic and external resources for poverty alleviation, Issues note by the UNCTAD Secretariat. TD/CN.2/GE.1/2, November 1993 and Recent Development in Social Funds and Safety Nets, Background note paper by the UNCTAD Secretariat. UNCTAD/PA/2. 22 November 1993. Back
Arab Unified Economic Report-AUER 1994. op.cit. Annex 1/5. p. 299 Back
AUER 1994. op.cit. Annex 11/6. p. 332. Back
AUER 1994. op.cit. Annex 6/6. p. 324. Back
AUER 1992 . Annexes 2/13 B, p. 213 and 5/3, p. 223. Back
Though 1986 riot was not directly related to food subsidies, the significance of the event is far more than urban riot. On February 25, 1986, several thousand of anti- riot police the Central Security Forces which was stationed in Giza across the Nile from Cairo mutinied against the state by looted, burned, and destroyed hotels, stores, cars, and nightclubs in the Pyramid district-Egypt's main tourist district. As put by the Egyptian sociologist Ibrahim that was the first time in recent Egyptian and other Arab countries history that an arm of the state, especially one whose sole function is to deal with riots, have challenged the authority of the regime. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Domestic Developments in Egypt, pp. 19-62. in William B. Quandt, ed., The Middle East Ten Years after Camp David, The Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., USA. 1988. Back
Mourad M. Wahba, On the Implementation of Economic Policy in Egypt, Business Monthly, Journal of the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt 5 (July 1989) as cited by Löfgren, op.cit. p.412 and footnote 40, p. 419. Back
Christian Morrisson, Adjustment, Income and Poverty in Morocco, World Development, Vol. 19, No. 11, 1991. pp. 1633-1651. Back
Eva Bellin. op.cit. Back
OPEC Bulletin, March 1993. p. 36 Back
Middle East Economic Digest-MEED, 14 July 1989. The increase was according to RCC decision No. 379 dated 18 June 1989. Back
Alef-Ba Weekly, Baghdad, No. 1128, May 9, 1990. p. 26 Back
Nassar, S, The Economic Impact of Reform Programs in the Agricultural Sector in Egypt, Ministry of Agriculture Linstock and Fishery Wealth and Land Reclamation, Cairo, 1993. As cited by Bromley and Bush, op.cit. Back
Ministry of Planning, Annual Abstract of Statistics 1989. Baghdad. Table 14/1. p. 360. Back
Quoted from the Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram Iktisadi in South- April 1986, as cited by Boratav, op.cit. p. 41. Back
John Waterbury, The 'Soft State' and the Open Door: Egypt's Experience with Economic Liberalization 1974-1984, Comparative Politics, 18 October 1985, as quoted by Löfgren, op.cit. p. 412. Back
UNCTAD, Exchange of experience on poverty reduction impacts of social funds and safety nets, including mobilization of domestic and external resources for poverty alleviation, Issues note by the UNCTAD Secretariat. TD/CN.2/GE.1/2, November 1993 and Recent Development in Social Funds and Safety Nets, Background note paper by the UNCTAD Secretariat. UNCTAD/PA/2. 22 November 1993 Back
Eva Bellin, op.cit. P. 434 Back
Korkut Boratav, Public Sector, Public intervention and Economic Development: The impact of changing perspectives and policies during the 1980s. UNCTAD Discussion Paper, No. 61. July 1993. p. 33. Back
National Bank of Egypt, op.cit. p. 20 Back
Volker Perthes, op.cit. p. 221 Back
Middle East Study Association of North America-MESA Bulletin, Vol., 28, No.: 1, July 1994. pp. 73-75. Back
In Iraq a radical move was undertaken to undercut Trade Union by changing all public sector "workers" into "employees" according to RCC decision No. 150 dated April 1, 1987. The logical consequences were to make all Trade Unions redundant and Labour Law nullified since it is not allowed for government employees to be members in any trade union on one hand and government employment is regulated and governs by Civil Service Law and other Law but not the Labour Law. Back
Ministry of Planning, Annual Abstract of Statistics, 1986 (Table 12/10, p. 248), 1987 (Table 12/10, p. 248), and 1989 (Table 12/10, p. 308). Baghdad. Back
Yusuf Bangura, Economic Restructuring, Coping Strategies and Social Changes: Implications for Institutional Development in Africa, Development and Change Vol. 25 (1994), pp. 785 - 827. Back
Al-Iraq daily newspaper, Baghdad No. 4235, 12 December 1989. Back
The above data are from Idriss Jazairy, Mohiuddin Alamgir and Theresa Panuccio- (IFAD), The State of World Rural Poverty. IT Publication, London, 1992. Table 6. pp. 404-407. Back
Cited in M. Riad El-Ghonemy, Land, Food and Rural Development in North Africa, IT Publication, London, 1993, footnote 13, page 116 Back
Ahmed Ali, Finance and Credit, in Zahlan and Magar, eds. The Agricultural Sector of Sudan. London: Ithaca Press. 1986. Cited by M. Riad El-Ghonemy (1993), op.cit. p. 107. The sheil system is similar to a system which was operational in the rural communities of southern Iraq before 1958 known as ala-qather, meaning while the crop is green (author) Back
The OPEC Fund for International Development, OPEC Aid Institutions: A Profile, Vienna, 1994. p. 7. The term food security can also be looked at from other micro or masso perspectives: the "hunger" perspective: adequacy of supply to all at all times; Also from the "entitlements" perspective: since the entitlements of different households to adequate nutrition is dependant upon what the system enables them to acquire food through production, market exchange, and public distribution (Author). Back
This rather sad observation is not peculiar to the Arab countries alone. In fact out of 103 developing countries covered by the World Bank WDR 1992, only 21 countries have reported on income distribution during years before 1990. The situation has been improved little later where the WDR 1994 includes information on income distribution on 45 out of 109 developing countries. Out of these 45 countries, only 18 of them reported on recent income distribution for years 1990-92. The Report does not provide any time series figures on any country. Back
As cited by Bromley and Bush, op.cit. Back
El-Ghonemy, M. Riad., The Political Economy of Rural Poverty. The case for land reform. Routledge, London 1990. p. 237 Back
UNCTAD, Final Report of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Comparative Experience with Privatization to the Trade and Development Board, TD/B/40(2)/21 TD/B/WG.3/16, 1994. Back
National Bank of Egypt, op.cit. p. 11 Back
Guardian Weekly, London, December 18, 1994. P. 7 Back
Abbas Al-Nassrawi, ***, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 2, 1992. pp. ***. Back
Kiren Aziz Chaudhry, op.cit. Back
ONA is Africa's largest private group. In addition to the fact that the royal family owns 18 per cent of ONA's capital, its managing director is the prime minister's son as well as being King Hassan's son-in-law. Jacques de Barrin, Africa's 'mini-iger' is losing its roar, Le Monde reprinted in Guardian Weekly, London, May 14, 1995. p. 14. Back
UNCTAD, Report of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Comparative Experience with Privatization on its third session. TD/B/40(2)/5 TD/B/WG.3/13. December 1993. Back
Bruno, M., Introduction to Liberalization with Stabilization in the Southern Cone of Latin America, World Development, Vol. 13, No. 8, 1985. pp. 867-70 Back
These issues were analysed in an introduction and four articles included in a Special Section on "Rentiers, Capitalists and the State in Africa", World Development, Vol, 22, No. 33. 1994. pp. 423-482. Back
"The Tempo of capital flight increased in the presence of liberalization and high rates of inflation, with estimates that range between US$ 14 to US$ 60 billion for the period under consideration [1978/85]" Hassan, Fareed Mohamed Ahmed, Is Adjustment with Equitable Economic Growth Possible? Evidence from a Developing Country, Canadian Journal of Development Studies, Vol. XV, No. 2, 1994. pp. 219-240. p. 228 Back
This preoccupation has been raised by many such as Willem van der Geest in his review of Anne O. Krueger's book Political Economy of Policy Reform in Developing Countries. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1993. Development Policy Review, Vol. 12. 1994. ODI. Back
UNCTAD, Report of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Comparative Experience with Privatization on its first session, TD/B/39(2)/8 TD/B/WG.3/5, 1992. Item 23 p. 5. Back
This was observed by Iliya Harik in reviewed book by Tim Niblock & Emma Murphy (eds.), Economic and Political Liberalization in the Middle East. London: British Academic Press, 1993. MESA Bulletin 28 1994. p. 73 Back
Bhaskar V., Privatization and the Developing Countries: The Issues and the Evidence. UNCTAD Discussion Paper, No. 47. August 1992. P. 8 Back