Author: Farwa Sial

Research Associate Department of Economics SOAS Head of Research and Policy - Asia Region IDEAs

Book Review of Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East

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Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. ISBN: 9781108453158 (paper); ISBN: 9781108614443 (ebook)

Adam Hanieh’s book ‘Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East’ is one of the most important works on contemporary Middle East. The book analyses the specificity of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) as part of global capitalism by focusing on the socio-economic structures of the six Gulf States, the interlinkages between them and other socio-economic and financial relationships with the rest of the world. Joining other scholars, Hanieh draws attention to the fact that scholarship on the Middle East including the GCC has inclined towards an exceptionalism which overwhelmingly focuses on the Middle East as a resource-rich country and a site of various conflicts. This reductive emphasis diminishes the various ways in which the region integrates the contemporary patterns of capital accumulation and historical lineages of familial and monarchic capitalism. As he mentions, even the modern concept of the ‘BRICS’ excludes the large population of the Middle East. Filling this vacuum, the book focuses on how the GCC absorbs and reproduces contemporary modalities of capital accumulation in diverse sectors including finance, agribusiness, real estate, retail, telecommunications, and urban utilities. The six states of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain have special linkages with global powers including the US, Israel, China and other Arab states. As important logistics hubs and sites of intermediate supply chains these states also connect with other countries.Read More »

The Economics of being ‘Interesting’: Many kinds of exclusions

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This post engages with a conversational post titled Non-exemplary lives by Branko Milanovic. He is concerned with the current state of academia being filled with boring economists who have a CV full of publications but no experience of living and no interests outside work. Milanovic thus raises the question of how a lack of these influences impacts the profession of economics. 

While his is an apt observation, I think his questions can be broadened in many ways. For the sake of brevity, I will concentrate on a few. 

Exemplary Lives, but what kind of Examples? 

The notion of an ‘exemplary life’ is fraught with the possibilities of what a ‘non-exemplary life’ could be, and vice versa. To fully appreciate the scope of either, it is useful to question how the negation of the other can be fully gauged.

Put differently, is the ‘exemplary life’ really that exemplary- might there be a difference between the persona and the person? 

Consider what being an émigré has meant for two different economists: the Ukraine born Alexander Gerschenkron who settled in the US and the St-Lucian born Arthur Lewis who lived and worked in the UK.  Read More »

Historicising the Aid Debate: South Korea as a Successful Aid Recipient

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‘The principal enemy is orthodoxy: to use the same recipe, administer the same therapy, to resolve the most various types of problems; never to admit complexity and try to reduce it as much as possible, while ignoring that things are always more complicated in reality.
Albert O. Hirschman (1998:110)

It’s clear from last week’s blog posts by Duncan Green that he is tired of academic critique against aid which have not been translated into concrete solutions (see here and here). However, the problem with his ‘marmite’ approach to addressing very complex problems is that it leads to reductive debates which are more symptomatic of the problem than constructive ways of finding solutions. Following Pablo Yanguas’ synthesis of research approaches I thought of taking a step back and analyzing the case of a successful aid recipient, South Korea.  I do this in hope of moving away from the ‘literature’ – which Duncan finds overbearing – as well as getting away from the linearity of the contemporary monitoring and evaluation approach used by the aid sector. Read More »

Why positive thinking won’t get you out of poverty

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attitude-be-positive-draw-262532.jpgBy Farwa Sial and Carolina Alves

In a recent article in the New York Times, the development economist Seema Jayachandran discusses three studies that used Randomised Controlled Trials (or RCTs) to understand the benefits of enhancing the self-worth of poor people. Despite wide differences in context, all the cases explore the viability of ‘modest interventions’ to ‘instill hope’ in marginalised communities, concluding that ‘remarkable improvements’ in the quest for poverty reduction are possible.

One of the studies from Uganda, for example, argues that “a role model can have significant effects on students’ educational attainment,” so the suggestion for policy-makers might be “to place more emphasis on motivation and inspiration through example.” Another case study of sex workers in Kolkata Brothels argues that “psychological barriers impede such disadvantaged groups from breaking the vicious circle and achieving better outcomes in life,” so small but effective changes that address these psychological constraints can alleviate the effects of poverty and social exclusion.

The underlying theme of these studies is that individuals can surmount the structural challenges of poverty through their own efforts using tools like ‘effective role models,’ the generation of ‘more hope,’ and the ‘improvement of their mental health.’ Positive psychology of this kind and an emphasis on behavior change to meet the goals of individuals have been around at least since the 1950s, first in the popular literature of self-help books and now in academia, where they form part of an increasingly fashionable trend to ‘do poverty reduction differently.’Read More »