Abstract
ABSTRACTThis article surveys and discusses prominent protagonists of the debate on socio‐economic inequality in the Arab region, with a special focus on the World Bank and Egypt. According to official data, the region holds remarkably low Gini coefficients in a context of declining inequality. This contradicts the popular perception of high social inequality as a major cause of regional protests since the Arab Spring; hence the reference to a ‘puzzle’ in mainstream literature. The debate about the reality of social inequality in the region has developed since 2011 — particularly in regard to Egypt, where income and consumption data are periodically collected by means of household surveys. Inequality measures based on this method alone, while income taxation data are inaccessible, are highly questionable and conflict with various observations and calculations based on other indicators such as national accounts, executive income or house prices. Yet, the World Bank upholds official inequality findings in portraying the Arab upheaval as the revolt of a ‘middle class’ that aspires to greater business freedom, in consonance with the neoliberal worldview.
Highlights
Interest in income and wealth inequality as a topic of research and discussion was certainly boosted by the international success of the English translation of Thomas Piketty’s very famous book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Piketty, 2014)
This article elaborates on a keynote lecture delivered at a conference on inequalities in the Arab region held on 13–14 September 2018 at the American University of Beirut (AUB) to mark the launch of the Arabic translation of the 2016 World Social Science Report (ISSC and IDS, 2016)
The conference was jointly organized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the AUB’s Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies and the Arab Forum for Alternatives
Summary
Interest in income and wealth inequality as a topic of research and discussion was certainly boosted by the international success of the English translation of Thomas Piketty’s very famous book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Piketty, 2014). A central issue in these contradictory perspectives is the credibility of available figures on socio-economic inequality: in the Arab countries, these data are either limited to consumption inequality or based, at best, on household surveys This points to a major flaw in international comparisons of inequality published by the IFIs: they end up comparing apples and oranges by including in one and the same list figures based on different calculation modes, ranging from household consumption surveys to income taxation data.. This points to a major flaw in international comparisons of inequality published by the IFIs: they end up comparing apples and oranges by including in one and the same list figures based on different calculation modes, ranging from household consumption surveys to income taxation data.1 The latter are available only for a minority of countries in the world, mostly belonging to the global North. The latter stems from an interpretation of the Arab Spring and leads to policy recommendations which are fundamentally consistent with the neoliberal paradigm adopted by the IFIs since the 1980s.2
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