Introduction: Arab Development via the Channels of War and Oil

Abstract

Since the extraordinary events of early 2011, living conditions for the majority of the working population in the Arab World (hereinafter AW) have not changed for the better, and indeed, may have worsened. During the writing of this introduction in early 2015, food prices remain at their highest since 2008, the standards for resource allocation are the same, and several wars ravage the region. Changes in allocation and redistribution arrangements would require a restructuring of social formations. The Muslim Brotherhood (MB), where elected, have not enacted new policies or introduced reforms that will lead to prosperity. Their message is the same as that of their neoliberal predecessors: without undergoing short-term austerity, there will be no prosperity in the long term. The Egyptian military, that captured power by putsch in July 2013 from the MB, lifted subsidies on essentials which the Mubarak regime had never dared do. Only labour-biasing institutions that favour labour underwrite the rights of the working population to their fair share of national income. Unlike the invisible hand of the free market, which never allocates resources efficiently because it is really the hand of capital, the not-so invisible hand of a state that embodies the rights of labour has to be assigned the role of resource allocation.