ABSTRACT
Arab Spring has swept Middle East and North Africa. Although the reasons behind this revolutionary albeit mostly unfruitful social phenomenon is unknown, economic reasons such as income inequality and lack of income mobility have been mentioned. Using an approach that is free of measurement error and attrition biases, this study estimates income mobility in a country that went through Arab Spring, Egypt, and compares that with a similar country that did not experience it, Jordan. The results show that unconditional and conditional income mobility were substantially smaller in Egypt than Jordan. This has implications for the policy-makers not just in the Middle East but the world.
Acknowledgement
The author wishes to sincerely thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on this manuscript. The author is grateful to Jeffery B. Nugent and Adeel Malik for reviewing an earlier version of this paper. The data used in this study were offered by Economic Research Forum (ERF) and its Open Access Microdata Data Initiative (OAMDI) for offering the necessary data without which this research was not possible.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 See Marouani (Citation2010) for policies addressing youth unemployment.
2 Salehi-Isfahani, Hassine, and Assaad (Citation2014) studied inequality of opportunity in Middle East and North Africa.
3 Rodríguez, Rodríguez, and Salas (Citation2008) developed a relationship between income mobility and inequality.
4 Initiated by Deaton (Citation1985), they were developed extensively by Browning, Deaton, and Irish (Citation1985), Moffitt (Citation1993), Collado (Citation1997), Girma (Citation2000), McKenzie (Citation2004) and Verbeek and Vella (Citation2005), among others.
5 Except very few exceptions, there are at least 200 household heads in each cohort-year group in Egypt and 100 household heads in Jordan.