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Rabah Arezki is the Chief Economist for Middle East and North Africa Region (MNA) at the World Bank. Previously, he was the Chief of the Commodities Unit in the Research Department at the International Monetary Fund. He also was a senior fellow at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution, an external research associate at the University of Oxford, a resource person for the African Economic Research Consortium and a research fellow at the Economic Research Forum.
Mr. Arezki is the author and co-author of numerous academic journal publications and other publications, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the World Bank Economic Review, the Economic Journal, the Journal of International Economics, the Journal of Development Economics and Economic Policy. Mr. Arezki’s research covers a wide array of topics energy and the environment, the macro-development resource rich countries, institutions, human capital, innovation and economic growth.
Mr. Arezki is the co-editor, and co-author of four books including Beyond the Curse: Policies to Harness the Power of Natural Resources, Commodity Price Volatility and Inclusive Growth in Low-Income Countries, Shifting Commodity Markets in a Globalized World, and Coping with the Climate Crisis: Mitigation Policies and Global Coordination (forthcoming).
Many of Mr. Arezki’s research papers have been cited extensively in academic circles and in prominent media outlets such as the Economist, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Project Syndicate, and the Washington Post. His blog posts including on the recent oil price collapse and its global economic consequences have been viewed over hundred thousand times and have been listed as the most read IMF blog posts three years in a row. Mr. Arezki is also a frequent contributor to Finance and Development magazine, VoxEU, an associate editor of the Revue d’Economie du Développement and was until recently the Editor of the IMF Research Bulletin.
A dual citizen of Algeria and France, Mr. Arezki received his M.S. from the Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l’Administration Economique in Paris, M.A. from the University of Paris-1 Pantheon-Sorbonne and Ph.D. in economics from the European University Institute, Florence.
However unsurmountable geopolitical crises may seem today, it will be domestic protests that determine the social and economic landscape in the Middle East in the coming years.
Governments in the Middle East and North Africa must restore confidence in their abilities to lead change.
The MENA region needs bolder and deeper economic reforms. GDP growth is projected to be 0.6 percent in the region in 2019, a fraction of what is needed to create enough jobs for its fast-growing working-age population. Even in the few countries that have had periods of higher growth since the 2011 Arab Spring, poverty rates have failed to drop, suggesting the need for reforms to instill fair competition and promote more inclusive patterns of growth.
Female labor force participation levels in Arab countries are the lowest in the world — despite the rising educational attainment of women reaching working age. Indeed, young women across the Arab world exceed the education levels of young men, who are worrisomely falling behind. Remedying the underrepresentation of Arab women in the labor force and reviving the educational motivation of young men are both social and economic imperatives.
Economic development paradigms have shifted focus over past decades: from minimizing imports to encouraging exports as the path to prosperity. Individual countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have had little success under either paradigm — the result being stagnant economies and high unemployment, especially among young people. Perhaps now is the time for MENA countries to follow a different path and focus on harnessing the power of their collective domestic demand to foster economic development.
