ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the evolution of economic growth in the region since the 1960s and explores how it has differed over time and across our three categories of countries. It shows that the region's performance transition from an import substitution model in the 1960s to an export promotion model after the 1990s. The chapter describes the contours of the massive policy shift, and evaluates its costs and benefits from an economic and social perspective. It argues that while the uprisings of 2011 cannot be directly attributed to this shift, its various repercussions laid the basis for the social discontent underlying them. Economic growth in the Middle East and North Africa region was determined in important ways by its development strategy: a rising period under import substitution and state activism; and followed by a period of structural adjustment that saw over a decade of low growth.
