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Karen Pfeifer

Smith College, Economics, Emerita

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Karen Pfeifer is Professor Emerita of Economics at Smith College, where she taught from 1979 to 2010. Pfeifer's main teaching and research interest is comparative economic systems, with an area focus on economic growth and transformation in the Middle East and North Africa. She was named a Fulbright senior scholar in 1993-1994 and 2001-2002, and has done research in Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories, Tunisia and Turkey. Scholarly projects in recent years include the relationship between the field of economics and Middle East Studies, economies of the Maghreb since 2011, economic justice for women in Egypt and Tunisia since 2011, neoliberalism and the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, and possibilities for a new economic agenda in Tunisia and Egypt. She has served as an editor of Research in Middle East Economics, Review of Middle East Economics and Finance, and Middle East Report. Pfeifer earned her doctorate in economics at The American University in 1981.

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Katarzyna Sidlo

Centrum Analiz Społeczno-Ekonomicznych

GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies

Mohamed Said S Saadi

SOAS University of London

Villanova University

hamza hamouchene

Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Middle East and North Africa

Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung

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Papers by Karen Pfeifer

Shifting Courses: Economies of the Maghreb after 2011

Theories of Development, Mode of Production or Dependency?

MERIP Middle East report, Jul 1, 1987

The Fate of the Family Farm

MERIP Middle East report, Mar 1, 1987

Please Don't Use my Name

MERIP reports, Feb 1, 1984

The material basis of Palestinian Society: A long-term perspective

Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies, Oct 1, 2003

Karen Armstrong’s history of Jerusalem from ancient times to the present shows that periods of ec... more Karen Armstrong’s history of Jerusalem from ancient times to the present shows that periods of economic growth and prosperity in Palestine routinely occurred under regimes that promoted mutual respect among the various peoples resident in that land. Conversely, economic malaise and decline followed in the wake of intolerant regimes that discriminated against and expelled groups lacking political power. This case poignantly illustrates the necessary framing of economic activity by socio-political institutions, like administrative policy, public provision of infrastructure, and resource distribution, that regulate relationships among economic actors and make the outcomes of investment, trade, and employment predictable and beneficial. Well-functioning institutions facilitate prosperity and ameliorate socio-economic tensions, but they also must work well enough to contain these tensions and prevent overt social conflict when economic growth slows or becomes negative. The central dynamic of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is competing nationalisms. On the one hand, the Zionist program has aimed to build a Jewish state by systematically displacing Palestinian Arab society from historic Palestine. On the other hand, the Palestinians have long constituted a living society with their own original economy and consistently contested the exclusionary principle of the Zionist project. The central figurative dynamic of this conflict is political, with economics in the background. However, this paper temporarily reverses figure and ground, placing the economic dimensions of the conflict into the limelight and providing an economic interpretation distinct from, but compatible with, political analysis. The argument focuses on the drive by Zionism to reorganize the material resources of Palestine, including Palestinian labor, for its own propagation, and the complex relationship that has evolved between the Jewish and Arab economic sectors.

1 Arab Economies and Globalization: An Overview

Lynne Rienner Publishers eBooks, Dec 31, 2003

13. Is There an Islamic Economics?

University of California Press eBooks, Dec 31, 1997

Three Worlds or Three Worldviews?: State Capitalism and Development

MERIP reports, Jun 1, 1979

What was the meaning of the 1968 coup in Peru? Did it usher in an era of socialist transformation... more

Neoliberal Transformation and the Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2016

By the lights of the international financial institutions, Tunisia and Egypt were the celebrated ... more By the lights of the international financial institutions, Tunisia and Egypt were the celebrated success stories of the Washington Consensus, or neoliberal reform, in the Arab Mediterranean and participated fully in the worldwide economic boom of the 2000-2008 period. Neoliberalism promised to shrink government and promote private enterprise as the engine of growth and new job creation. While fewer resources were provided to public investment and services like health and education, private investment did not fully compensate, even as most benefits of growth, liberalization and privatization were concentrated in the hands of a class of crony capitalists led by the ruling families. Throughout the 2000s, the underside of neoliberal growth became more glaring, including capital flight, the limited contributions of FDI and open trade to domestic development, growing regional disparities, multidimensional poverty, multidimensional inequality, and malfunctions of the labor market. Social movements grew in opposition to this neoliberal polity and economy among both the middle and working classes. When the economic crisis of 2008-2010 caused a slowdown in economic growth and aggravated unemployment and poverty, the opposition movements grew stronger and more interconnected. To hold power, the ruling elite intensified electoral fraud and the often-brutal repression of opposition movements. The final insult was the maneuvering by the ruling families to convert their presidential systems to dynastic rule. By the end of 2010, these forces converged into a perfect storm that led to the overthrow of Presidents Ben Ali and Mubarak.

Parameters of economic reform in North Africa

Review of African Political Economy, Dec 1, 1999

The North African economies' relationship to the international capitalist system is also up ... more

Islamic business and business as usual: A study of firms in Egypt

Development in Practice, Feb 1, 2001

Fifteen Egyptian firms producing goods and services were classified into two sets by method of fi... more Fifteen Egyptian firms producing goods and services were classified into two sets by method of finance, i.e. profit sharing for the seven Islamic versus debt-at-interest for the eight non-Islamic firms. Interviewed in 1993 and 1994, the two groups were found to be similar in customer relations and market behaviour and in paternalism towards employees. However, the non-Islamic firms had a significantly higher average profit rate, while the Islamic firms paid a significantly higher average wage, suggesting that cultural institutions shape economic behaviour even in a well-established market economy.

When The Twain Shall Meet: Middle East Area Studies And The Discipline of Economics

Topics in Middle Eastern andNorth African Economies, 2009

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals and Magazines at Loyola e... more

Shifting Courses

Indiana University Press eBooks, Apr 1, 2019

Contradictions of the Arab Spring Movements and Their Aftermath The Arab Spring movements were th... more Contradictions of the Arab Spring Movements and Their Aftermath The Arab Spring movements were the first wave of an ongoing tsunami of popular movements around the globe expressing resentment of ruling regimes that facilitated the neoliberal form of globalization. That transformation had benefited mainly the wealthy and politically connected and left many ordinary people behind. Despite running critiques by the economic experts that our North African economies did not undertake liberalizing structural reforms fast enough or thoroughly enough, they were sufficiently integrated into the globalization process to roll with its growth and crisis in the 2000s and to suffer from the aftermath of the "Great Recession" and subsequent stagnation. In this larger context, the problems and limitations the Maghreb economies faced internally as of 2016 were framed by inexorable external factors that impeded their growth and development, from the least politically stable and economically successful of the group, Libya, to the most stable and successful, Morocco. It was inaccurate and unfair to blame continuing slow growth in North Africa solely on the Arab Spring uprisings, especially in the case of Tunisia, either explicitly or implicitly. 1 The Arab Spring movements demanded both economic and political change, to adjust growth-and-development trajectories to benefit the middle and working classes. However, with the partial exception of Tunisia, these demands were not met. Indeed in some cases, such as Libya, the result was civil war and economic anarchy that had yet to be brought under control as of 2017. In other cases, including Algeria, Mauritania and Morocco, political regimes made minor concessions but governance and economic structures remained fundamentally the same. Indeed, as the editors of this volume argue, authoritarianism was rejuvenated in the years after the Arab Spring. Even in Tunisia, where economic transformation was stalled by the inability of the newly reformed competitive parliamentary system to produce a viable program, a fragile democratic governance was steadily threatened by restraints on citizens' rights under the state emergency law (renewed again in November of 2017), which gave the executive branch power to constrict freedom of the press, labor actions, and civic assemblies, as well as newly drafted laws granting amnesty to corrupt officials from the Ben Ali era and increased power and impunity to state security forces. Economic malaise and the rejuvenation of authoritarianism seemed to reinforce each other. The Maghreb in Global Economic Context International agencies and researchers reported in 2016 that the world economy seemed to be in a period of prolonged stagnation, with contributing factors on both the demand and the supply sides. 2 In October 2016, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecast only a modest rise in growth over the following five years, if conditions improved and major risks were avoided. Even at their best, these rates would be significantly lower than the average 4.2 percent per year during the 1998-2007 boom years. The pattern was strongly influenced by very low growth in the "advanced" economies, especially the Euro area and Japan, and by the

The Political Economy of Development: Theory and the Prospects for Change in the Third World

Middle East report, Nov 1, 1993

Gulf Arab Financial Flows and Investment, 2000-2010: Promises, Process and Prospects in the MENA Region

Review of Middle East Economics and Finance, Jan 31, 2012

The Gulf Arab countries were promoted as dynamic, rapidly growing and self-transforming economies... more The Gulf Arab countries were promoted as dynamic, rapidly growing and self-transforming economies in the boom years of the 2000s, and were praised for their purported leadership of the MENA regional economy. As of 2010, despite the severity of the financial crisis and recession of 2008-2009 in the Gulf and consequent impact on the rest of the region, the GCC countries were still promoted as potential leaders of both the recovery and future regional development. An examination of the evidence regarding the direction, magnitude and uses of GCC financial flows both domestically and internationally from 2000 to 2010 finds that the investment programs in place in the boom years provided outcomes that only weakly fulfilled these promises and that they barely fulfilled them at all during the economic crisis and recovery. The author's assessment is that GCCsourced investment since 2008 mainly addressed the Gulf region's internal development project, although even that seemed dependent on continued high levels of hydrocarbon revenues, and did little to demonstrate the promised leadership of the regional economy by the GCC.

Access-based or Transformative Empowerment for Women in Egypt and Tunisia since 2011

Beyond delineating what we claim to know about the actual economic situation of women in Egypt an... more Beyond delineating what we claim to know about the actual economic situation of women in Egypt and Tunisia before and after the uprisings of 2010-2011, there looms the question of how observers and agents of change define women’s economic “empowerment” and what purposes are served by the changes they propose to improve it

3 Oil on the Waters? Middle East Studies and Economics for the Middle East

New York University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020

Reform or Reaction? Dilemmas of Economic Development in the Middle East

Middle East report, 1999

To Clear the Minefield

Middle East report, 1998

Rubber Bullets was very popularly received in the US, prominently displayed in academic bookstore... more

Development by People: Citizen Construction of a Just World

MERIP reports, May 1, 1984

... Development by people: Citizen construction of a just world. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Au... more

Shifting Courses: Economies of the Maghreb after 2011

Theories of Development, Mode of Production or Dependency?

MERIP Middle East report, Jul 1, 1987

The Fate of the Family Farm

MERIP Middle East report, Mar 1, 1987

Please Don't Use my Name

MERIP reports, Feb 1, 1984

The material basis of Palestinian Society: A long-term perspective

Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies, Oct 1, 2003

Karen Armstrong’s history of Jerusalem from ancient times to the present shows that periods of ec... more Karen Armstrong’s history of Jerusalem from ancient times to the present shows that periods of economic growth and prosperity in Palestine routinely occurred under regimes that promoted mutual respect among the various peoples resident in that land. Conversely, economic malaise and decline followed in the wake of intolerant regimes that discriminated against and expelled groups lacking political power. This case poignantly illustrates the necessary framing of economic activity by socio-political institutions, like administrative policy, public provision of infrastructure, and resource distribution, that regulate relationships among economic actors and make the outcomes of investment, trade, and employment predictable and beneficial. Well-functioning institutions facilitate prosperity and ameliorate socio-economic tensions, but they also must work well enough to contain these tensions and prevent overt social conflict when economic growth slows or becomes negative. The central dynamic of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is competing nationalisms. On the one hand, the Zionist program has aimed to build a Jewish state by systematically displacing Palestinian Arab society from historic Palestine. On the other hand, the Palestinians have long constituted a living society with their own original economy and consistently contested the exclusionary principle of the Zionist project. The central figurative dynamic of this conflict is political, with economics in the background. However, this paper temporarily reverses figure and ground, placing the economic dimensions of the conflict into the limelight and providing an economic interpretation distinct from, but compatible with, political analysis. The argument focuses on the drive by Zionism to reorganize the material resources of Palestine, including Palestinian labor, for its own propagation, and the complex relationship that has evolved between the Jewish and Arab economic sectors.

1 Arab Economies and Globalization: An Overview

Lynne Rienner Publishers eBooks, Dec 31, 2003

13. Is There an Islamic Economics?

University of California Press eBooks, Dec 31, 1997

Three Worlds or Three Worldviews?: State Capitalism and Development

MERIP reports, Jun 1, 1979

What was the meaning of the 1968 coup in Peru? Did it usher in an era of socialist transformation... more

Neoliberal Transformation and the Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2016

By the lights of the international financial institutions, Tunisia and Egypt were the celebrated ... more By the lights of the international financial institutions, Tunisia and Egypt were the celebrated success stories of the Washington Consensus, or neoliberal reform, in the Arab Mediterranean and participated fully in the worldwide economic boom of the 2000-2008 period. Neoliberalism promised to shrink government and promote private enterprise as the engine of growth and new job creation. While fewer resources were provided to public investment and services like health and education, private investment did not fully compensate, even as most benefits of growth, liberalization and privatization were concentrated in the hands of a class of crony capitalists led by the ruling families. Throughout the 2000s, the underside of neoliberal growth became more glaring, including capital flight, the limited contributions of FDI and open trade to domestic development, growing regional disparities, multidimensional poverty, multidimensional inequality, and malfunctions of the labor market. Social movements grew in opposition to this neoliberal polity and economy among both the middle and working classes. When the economic crisis of 2008-2010 caused a slowdown in economic growth and aggravated unemployment and poverty, the opposition movements grew stronger and more interconnected. To hold power, the ruling elite intensified electoral fraud and the often-brutal repression of opposition movements. The final insult was the maneuvering by the ruling families to convert their presidential systems to dynastic rule. By the end of 2010, these forces converged into a perfect storm that led to the overthrow of Presidents Ben Ali and Mubarak.

Parameters of economic reform in North Africa

Review of African Political Economy, Dec 1, 1999

The North African economies' relationship to the international capitalist system is also up ... more

Islamic business and business as usual: A study of firms in Egypt

Development in Practice, Feb 1, 2001

Fifteen Egyptian firms producing goods and services were classified into two sets by method of fi... more Fifteen Egyptian firms producing goods and services were classified into two sets by method of finance, i.e. profit sharing for the seven Islamic versus debt-at-interest for the eight non-Islamic firms. Interviewed in 1993 and 1994, the two groups were found to be similar in customer relations and market behaviour and in paternalism towards employees. However, the non-Islamic firms had a significantly higher average profit rate, while the Islamic firms paid a significantly higher average wage, suggesting that cultural institutions shape economic behaviour even in a well-established market economy.

When The Twain Shall Meet: Middle East Area Studies And The Discipline of Economics

Topics in Middle Eastern andNorth African Economies, 2009

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals and Magazines at Loyola e... more

Shifting Courses

Indiana University Press eBooks, Apr 1, 2019

Contradictions of the Arab Spring Movements and Their Aftermath The Arab Spring movements were th... more Contradictions of the Arab Spring Movements and Their Aftermath The Arab Spring movements were the first wave of an ongoing tsunami of popular movements around the globe expressing resentment of ruling regimes that facilitated the neoliberal form of globalization. That transformation had benefited mainly the wealthy and politically connected and left many ordinary people behind. Despite running critiques by the economic experts that our North African economies did not undertake liberalizing structural reforms fast enough or thoroughly enough, they were sufficiently integrated into the globalization process to roll with its growth and crisis in the 2000s and to suffer from the aftermath of the "Great Recession" and subsequent stagnation. In this larger context, the problems and limitations the Maghreb economies faced internally as of 2016 were framed by inexorable external factors that impeded their growth and development, from the least politically stable and economically successful of the group, Libya, to the most stable and successful, Morocco. It was inaccurate and unfair to blame continuing slow growth in North Africa solely on the Arab Spring uprisings, especially in the case of Tunisia, either explicitly or implicitly. 1 The Arab Spring movements demanded both economic and political change, to adjust growth-and-development trajectories to benefit the middle and working classes. However, with the partial exception of Tunisia, these demands were not met. Indeed in some cases, such as Libya, the result was civil war and economic anarchy that had yet to be brought under control as of 2017. In other cases, including Algeria, Mauritania and Morocco, political regimes made minor concessions but governance and economic structures remained fundamentally the same. Indeed, as the editors of this volume argue, authoritarianism was rejuvenated in the years after the Arab Spring. Even in Tunisia, where economic transformation was stalled by the inability of the newly reformed competitive parliamentary system to produce a viable program, a fragile democratic governance was steadily threatened by restraints on citizens' rights under the state emergency law (renewed again in November of 2017), which gave the executive branch power to constrict freedom of the press, labor actions, and civic assemblies, as well as newly drafted laws granting amnesty to corrupt officials from the Ben Ali era and increased power and impunity to state security forces. Economic malaise and the rejuvenation of authoritarianism seemed to reinforce each other. The Maghreb in Global Economic Context International agencies and researchers reported in 2016 that the world economy seemed to be in a period of prolonged stagnation, with contributing factors on both the demand and the supply sides. 2 In October 2016, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecast only a modest rise in growth over the following five years, if conditions improved and major risks were avoided. Even at their best, these rates would be significantly lower than the average 4.2 percent per year during the 1998-2007 boom years. The pattern was strongly influenced by very low growth in the "advanced" economies, especially the Euro area and Japan, and by the

The Political Economy of Development: Theory and the Prospects for Change in the Third World

Middle East report, Nov 1, 1993

Gulf Arab Financial Flows and Investment, 2000-2010: Promises, Process and Prospects in the MENA Region

Review of Middle East Economics and Finance, Jan 31, 2012

The Gulf Arab countries were promoted as dynamic, rapidly growing and self-transforming economies... more The Gulf Arab countries were promoted as dynamic, rapidly growing and self-transforming economies in the boom years of the 2000s, and were praised for their purported leadership of the MENA regional economy. As of 2010, despite the severity of the financial crisis and recession of 2008-2009 in the Gulf and consequent impact on the rest of the region, the GCC countries were still promoted as potential leaders of both the recovery and future regional development. An examination of the evidence regarding the direction, magnitude and uses of GCC financial flows both domestically and internationally from 2000 to 2010 finds that the investment programs in place in the boom years provided outcomes that only weakly fulfilled these promises and that they barely fulfilled them at all during the economic crisis and recovery. The author's assessment is that GCCsourced investment since 2008 mainly addressed the Gulf region's internal development project, although even that seemed dependent on continued high levels of hydrocarbon revenues, and did little to demonstrate the promised leadership of the regional economy by the GCC.

Access-based or Transformative Empowerment for Women in Egypt and Tunisia since 2011

Beyond delineating what we claim to know about the actual economic situation of women in Egypt an... more Beyond delineating what we claim to know about the actual economic situation of women in Egypt and Tunisia before and after the uprisings of 2010-2011, there looms the question of how observers and agents of change define women’s economic “empowerment” and what purposes are served by the changes they propose to improve it

3 Oil on the Waters? Middle East Studies and Economics for the Middle East

New York University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020

Reform or Reaction? Dilemmas of Economic Development in the Middle East

Middle East report, 1999

To Clear the Minefield

Middle East report, 1998

Rubber Bullets was very popularly received in the US, prominently displayed in academic bookstore... more

Development by People: Citizen Construction of a Just World

MERIP reports, May 1, 1984

... Development by people: Citizen construction of a just world. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Au... more

Professional Biography: Karen Pfeifer