Did the Arab Spring reduce MENA countries’ growth?

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the economic ramifications of the recent political reconfigurations that the MENA region witnessed, commonly known as the Arab Spring, utilizing MENA countries’ data for the period 2005–2016. Using the Arellano-Bond dynamic panel estimation, the paper estimates a growth model using the difference in the log of GDPC between periods t and t + 1. Buttressed by sufficient empirical evidence, the paper’s findings corroborate that the Arab Spring had been negatively associated with growth.

KEYWORDS:

• Arab Spring
• growth
• MENA countries
• dynamic panel data

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• G2
• O16
• P48
• N25

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ For example, Syria’s gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 16 percentage points on average each year during the period of 2011–2014 and witnessed a contraction by another 16 percent in 2015, 4 percent in 2016 and 3.4 percent in 2017 (Devarajan and Mottaghi 2017; Trading Economics 2018). Real GDP in Libya is estimated to have declined by 8.9 percent in 2015 and by 2.5 percent in 2016; additionally, absence of financing imports in Libya, mainly food, led to scarcities in basic commodities, flourishing black markets in different sectors (Devarajan and Mottaghi 2017).

² Our sample includes 16 Arab countries out of 23 countries in the MENA region. It includes Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Palestinian Territories, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syrian Arab Republic, Tunisia, and United Arab Emirates.