Middle East Initiative

BEIRUT — It is remarkable that peaceful street protests and demonstrations critical of the government have taken place simultaneously in recent weeks and months in at least 11 Arab countries. Ordinary people from all walks of life, but especially unemployed young men and women, continue to take to the streets in Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Algeria, Tunisia, Mauritania, Somalia, Palestine, Lebanon, and Morocco.

Thousands of Algerians again flooded streets across the country Friday in a “Million Man” march. Demonstrations first erupted last weekend, though state media only acknowledged the events on Tuesday.

Since early December 2018, protesters have gathered every Thursday in Amman’s Fourth Circle in the Zahran District in opposition to a revised version of the unpopular tax bill introduced last June. That original legislation had sparked a broad-based tax revolt across Jordan, which quickly turned into an informal referendum on the failures of neoliberal development—including diminishing social services, lower wages and rising unemployment. While the December 2018 and January 2019 protests echoed the economic refrains of the original June tax revolt, the tax protests took on a political character after the monarch approved the revised law.

BEIRUT — A great menace hovers over the Arab region and its people, and has started to nibble away at their societies and countries. Our region now is made up mostly of poor and vulnerable families, and it is corroding and fragmenting from within. Unlike the popular media images abroad of vast Arab wealth, the reality is the exact opposite. The Arab region is fracturing and disaggregating into a small group of wealthy people, a shrinking middle class, and masses of poor, vulnerable, and marginalized people who now account for 2/3 of all Arabs. Some 250 million people, out of a total Arab population of 400 million, are poor, vulnerable, and marginalized, according to important new research by Arab and international organizations.

Host Aroop Mukharji interviews Dr. Tarek Masoud, the Sultan of Oman Professor of International Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School, about the shifting political dynamics of the Middle East, the region's potential for democratization, and a triple snack of doughnuts, coffee, and Turkish delight.

Why do regimes allow some low-income business owners to avoid taxes by operating informally? Electoral incentives are central to prevailing explanations of governments’ forbearance of informal enterprise. Yet many unelected regimes host large informal economies. This article examines forbearance in non-democracies. We argue that unelected regimes forbear their supporters’ informal businesses. We test this argument in Jordan. Using survey data of over 3,800 micro and small enterprises (MSEs), we find that informal businesses are more likely to operate in districts with higher rates of public sector employment, the crown jewel of the Jordanian regime’s patronage. Interviews with over sixty of the surveyed firm owners across four strategically paired districts illustrate that business owners covet forbearance, and that kinship ties to public sector employees limit forbearance to regime supporters. Communities that attract higher rates of public sector employment forfeit higher levels of fiscal revenue by permitting informality. This complementarity between public sector employment and forbearance amplifies inequalities between regime supporters and opponents in non-democracies.