MENA’S INSTITUTIONAL FRAME WORK : REINFORCING THE STATUS QUO
FIGURE 5.13 Percentage of those who have “voiced” an opinion to a public official in the past month in selected world economies, 2010 a. Total population
b. By gender Spain Slovenia Portugal Poland Greece France Colombia Bulgaria Brazil Yemen, Rep. United Arab Emirates Tunisia Syrian Arab Republic West Bank and Gaza Morocco Lebanon Kuwait Jordan Iraq Egypt, Arab Rep. Bahrain Algeria
Slovenia Colombia Bahrain Portugal Kuwait France Spain Tunisia Brazil Bulgaria United Arab Emirates Iraq Yemen, Rep. Syrian Arab Republic Algeria West Bank and Gaza Morocco Lebanon Jordan Poland Greece Egypt, Arab Rep. 0
0
5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 Percent
5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 Percent Women Men
Source: Gallup World Poll 2011. See the appendix for more information on the poll.
low-quality, informal jobs prevents them from realizing their true value-adding potential and limits economic development outcomes. In an era when human capital is emerging as the primary asset of production, this missed opportunity can have particularly serious repercussions. Second, MENA countries could fail to capture the potential for building social cohesion that is associated with widespread access to social insurance. Social risk management usually works best with universal access. Institutional exclusion from such public mechanisms may very well have been the subtext of a dominant message of the Arab Spring—the lack of dignity felt by outsiders. Failure to respond could undermine the achievements of that movement. A third opportunity—linked to integrating the large number of young noncontributors into pension systems—must go hand in hand with close attention to the system’s fi nancial sustainability. A simple promise to
extend the current social insurance benefit package to masses of young system entrants would almost certainly be broken, because the systems are not fi nancially constituted to deliver benefits sustainable in the long term. However, widespread participation in a reformed social insurance system, realigned to establish a closer relationship between contributions and benefits, would distribute the system’s unfunded liabilities more equitably, both between and within generations. Finally, youth are a sizable and increasingly vocal part of the population in all MENA countries. The population under 25 years of age ranges from about 40 percent in Tunisia to nearly 70 percent in the Republic of Yemen. The Arab Spring was largely youth led, enabled by social media tools that youth wield with dexterity. Given this relative knowledge advantage, and the independence of social media from state control, the voice of this group will inevitably be
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