Inclusion and Resilience: The Way Forward for Social Safety Nets in the Middle East and North Africa
The Political Economy of SSN Reforms in the Middle East and North Africa: What Do Citizens Want?
SPEAKS survey and the Jordan Gives game provide new insights on these issues. Attitudes toward redistribution are shaped by multiple factors, and this section will focus on three major individual determinants: (a) beliefs on causes of poverty and success, (b) self-perceptions of one’s status in the welfare distribution, and (c) perceptions of prospects for upward mobility.
TABLE 4.1
Perceptions of Poverty in Jordan, Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, and the United States, c. 2006–12 % who believe “the poor are poor because…”
• Beliefs on causes of poverty and success. On an individual level, people who think that poverty is caused by lack of willpower or laziness and that success is a result of effort and hard work believe in a “just world,” where everyone gets what they deserve. Such a belief implies a lower preference for redistributive policies (Alesina and Angeletos 2005; Alesina and Giuliano 2009; Bénabou and Tirole 2006). • Self-perceived status in the welfare distribution. Preferences for redistribution, and consequently for SSN reform, depend, in part, on whether people perceive themselves to be potential net beneficiaries or benefactors of SSN programs. This, in turn, is determined by self-perceived rank in the welfare distribution, which is only partly reflected in objective measurements such as income or consumption (Cruces, Truglia, and Tetaz 2011; Ravallion and Lokshin 2000). • Perceptions on prospects for upward mobility. When thinking about longlasting redistributive policies, people take into account not just their current status and position in the welfare distribution but also their expected future position (Bénabou and Ok 2001; Ravallion and Lokshin 2000). Thus, people who are hopeful about future upward mobility are less likely to support redistributive SSN programs than people who do not hold such optimistic views about their future prospects.
“… society is unjust” or “… they are unlucky”
“… they are lazy”
41.6 78.3 57.9 61.7 73.5 38.4
58.4 21.7 42.1 38.3 26.5 61.6
China Europea India Jordan (middle class only) Latin America and the Caribbean United States
Sources: Authors’ calculations based on World Values Survey (WVS) 2006; Jordan Gives 2012. a. Continental Europe.
FIGURE 4.1
Perceived Causes of Poverty among Jordanian Middle Class, by Subjective Income Group, 2012 Why are poor people poor in Jordan? 70 60 Respondents, %
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50 40 30 20 10
Beliefs on the Causes of Poverty and Success Among the Jordanian middle class, injustice in society is more frequently deemed to be the main cause of poverty, as opposed to laziness. This perception is halfway between those held in regions like Latin America and the Caribbean and continental Europe, where SSNs are more developed, and the United States and China, where most citizens believe that poverty is a result of laziness and lack of willpower, as shown in table 4.1. Although this belief prevails at the mean, the perceptions differ between lower-middle- and upper-middle-class individuals. Data from Jordan reveal that middle-class individuals who report being closer to being poor are more likely than upper-middle-class individuals to believe that poverty is a result of injustice in society or of bad luck, as figure 4.1 il-
0 Lower-middle class Injustice in society or bad luck
Middle Upper-middle class Laziness or lack of willpower Other
Source: Authors’ calculations based on Jordan Gives 2012.
lustrates. In fact, the share of individuals who believe that laziness is at the core of poverty increases with income and is as high as 37 percent among the upper-middle class in Jordan. The Jordan Gives experiment indicates that perceptions about the poor are associated with the level of support for redistribution. Regression analysis on data from the Jordanian middle class (shown in annex 4D) indicates that those who believe that the poor are in this economic condi-
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