MENA Development Report – serie

Policies that constrain private sector competition and job creation abound in MENA. Such policies are often captured by few privileged firms with deep political connections. The millions of workers who bear the brunt are often unaware of the adverse impact of these policies on the jobs to which they aspire.

Water has always been a source of risks and opportunities in the Middle East and North Africa. Yet rapidly changing socioeconomic, political, and environmental conditions make water security a different, and more urgent, challenge than ever before. This report shows that water security is about much more than just coping with water scarcity. It entails ensuring the delivery of affordable and high quality water to citizens in order to reinforce relationships between service providers and customers and contribute to a renewed social contract. It involves managing the impacts of migration on water supplies to ensure -- against a backdrop of historic levels of displacement -- that both host and refugee communities enjoy equitable and reliable access without degrading water resources. As the report describes, water security is an urgent target, but also a target within reach. A host of potential solutions to the region's water management challenges exist. To make these solutions work, clear incentives are needed to change the way water is managed, conserved, and allocated. Countries in the region also will need to engage civil society and youth as well as promote social inclusion.

The Arab Spring protests caught most of the world by surprise and precipitated a chain of events that changed the course of history in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), ushering in a period of prolonged political instability and intense civil conflicts. The analysis of the Arab Spring aftermath sheds light on the interplay between economic, behavioral, 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 as well as on an eclectic mix of quantitative and qualitative methods and data. Given the complex nature of the Arab Spring and its aftermath, the study touches also on areas related to political economy and governance.

Renewing the social contract, one of the pillars of the new World Bank Group strategy for the Middle East and North Africa, requires a new development model built on greater trust; openness, transparency, inclusive and accountable service delivery; and a stronger private sector that can create jobs and opportunities for the youth of the region. Recent analytic work trying to explain weak job creation and insufficient private sector dynamism in the region point to formal and informal barriers to entry and competition. These barriers privilege a few (often unproductive) incumbents who enjoy a competition-edge due to their connections or ability to influence policy making and delivery. Policy recommendations to date in the field of governance for private sector policymaking have been too general and too removed from concrete, actionable policy outcomes. This report proposes -for the first time- to fill this policy and operational gap by answering the following question: What good governance features should be instilled in the design of economic policies and institutions to help shield them from capture, discretion and arbitrary implementation? The report proposes an innovative conceptual and measurement framework that encapsulates the governance features that could shield policies from capture, discretion and arbitrary enforcement that limits competition. The report offers a menu of operational and technical entry-points to enhance privilege-resistant policy making in a concrete way, that is politically tractable in different country contexts.

The Iraqi reconstruction experience after 2003 offers few successes and many failures from which the international community must learn. This paper tries to draw out lessons and provide recommendations for future reconstruction activities by examining the Iraqi reconstruction process after 2003.

Pre-pandemic the Middle East and North Africa was the only region in the world experiencing increases in poverty and declines in life satisfaction. This Report investigates how the COVID-19 pandemic changed the welfare of individuals and households in the region, by relying on phone surveys and micro-simulation exercises.

This book focuses on studying Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia, estimating the impact of trade policy on exports and their relationship with local labor market outcomes. The book suggests that trade has successfully boosted trade flows, but the benefits from this have not necessarily yielded better labor market outcomes and have not been equally shared.

This book focuses on studying Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia, investigating the role the institutional environment on firms and workers decisions to operate informally, and its relationship with higher level economic and social outcomes.

This report sheds light on public transport's role in women's access to economic opportunities in select MNA cities. It examines the links among mobility, gender, and access to economic opportunities. It provides evidence of gender differences in mobility patterns and travel behavior, as well as the barriers and challenges women face.

The report informs the policy dialogue and World Bank engagement on food and nutrition security in Middle East and North Africa through food system transformation at a critical economic and geopolitical juncture in the region.