1. Introduction

1. Introduction

This chapter seeks an explanation for the limited production and public release of official statistics in the Middle East and North Africa. It argues that certain regimes may be letting official statistics wither to avoid public dissent. Not producing statistical information hampers decision making but also limits the ability of citizens to rally against their authorities. To the degree that this reasoning explains past behavior, the calculation in favor of not producing and releasing official statistics has changed over the last two decades. Various regimes have become increasingly adept at controlling the media and with it the data that are allowed to inform public discourse. In a parallel development, production of statistics has democratized. In combination, this suggests that production of official statistics has become less risky from a public relations perspective and more desirable as economies have become more complex and the economic value of trusted, unbiased statistics greater.

In their book, “The Narrow Corridor,” Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson illustrate the limited capacity of the state of Lebanon by highlighting its inability to conduct a population census (the most recent was in 1932). Every country needs basic information on its residents for purposes of planning, development, and improvement of residents' quality of life, and population censuses are the go-to source for such data. Absence of reliable, up-to-date, accurate, detailed information on inhabitants limits the ability of any state to provide services. In the absence of detailed population data, bureaucrats fly blind, and public services are hard to organize; providing social protection and health and education services, developing budgets, running elections, estimating gross domestic product (GDP), and making growth estimates require recent population data. It is difficult to imagine how a state can function effectively and efficiently in the absence of up-to-date census data.

Acemoglu and Robinson explain that the absence of a census in Lebanon is not because of lack of the ability to implement a census but due to the failure of the authorities to convince the population of its necessity. In their explanation, the country’s powerful factions prefer an ineffective state over a capable one. Fear that one faction might end up dominating the public sector and, through it, other factions is behind this. Acemoglu and Robinson conclude that the revealed preference of Lebanon’s civil society is for a weak government that is unable to make informed decisions and monitor its services over a government that is capable and a potential threat.

With this illustration, Acemoglu and Robinson draw attention to various ties between governance and official statistics that will be explored in this chapter; official statistics are necessary for decision making, the quality of statistics reflects the ability of a state to serve its citizens, and the absence of timely and accurate statistics is costly but is more likely the consequence of a policy choice than the result a lack of technical capacity or financial resources. The chapter investigates plausible reasons explaining this policy choice and argues that, since the onset of the digital revolution, the costs and benefits of not producing and publicly disseminating statistics have changed in favor of greater data transparency. Decision makers in the region must still internalize this new reality, although some countries, Iran and West Bank and Gaza in particular, appear to have done so.

The chapter starts in section 2 by investigating how the availability and quality of statistics correlate with other indicators of economic policy and welfare. It reports high levels of correlation and argues that the quality of statistics is a plausible proxy for the state of the social contract. Keeping this concept in mind, the section evaluates how the quality of statistics (read the social contract) has evolved in the region since 2004—the first time statistical capacity was measured. In Sections 3 and 4, key issues identified in Islam (2022)—the limited production of statistics in the Middle East and North Africa and low degrees of data transparency in the region—are revisited. Section 3 explores production of core statistics. It focuses on collection of microdata and concludes that many data sets are outdated and that even the relatively well