ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the prodigious growth in the economic functions of the Middle Eastern state up to the 1980s, and focuses on the economic contradictions that emerged and weakened state-led development. It analyzes the political forces that created resistance to reforms up until the late 1980s, when they became inevitable in most of the region. The principal experiments with the Turkish paradigm were Egypt from 1957 to 1974, Algeria from 1962 to 1989, Syria from 1963 to the present, Iraq from 1963 to 2003, Tunisia from 1962 to 1969, Sudan from 1969 to 1972, and Libya from 1969 to the present. The monarchies of pre-1979 Iran, Jordan, and Morocco all professed liberal economic credos in which the private sector was to be the leading force. State-led growth had brought about a certain amount of structural transformation, but rapid population growth and the collapse of oil prices overwhelmed the income-raising effects that such transformation was presumed to yield.
