Comparative political economy of the IMF arrangements after the Arab uprisings: Egypt and Tunisia

Date

2016-01-01

Author

Hecan, Mehmet

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

214
views

0
downloads

In the post-uprising period, while Tunisia was relatively successful in its negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which provided it with a stand-by agreement in the amount of $1.74 billion, Egypt remained far from reaching any agreement. In an attempt to explain the difference between the IMF experiments in the two countries, that is, the factors leading to the signing of an agreement with the IMF or the inability to do so, this article proposes two arguments, based upon one positive and one negative factor: (1) distinctive domestic political dynamics and (2) the availability of alternative resources. In the two cases, the article argues that the IMF experiment was more successful in Tunisia because Tunisia enjoyed a more suitable domestic political environment which promoted and enabled reforms and thus enabled the negotiations with the IMF. Tunisia also lacked alternative resources that could be used as substitutes for the IMF loan. On the other hand, the IMF negotiations were not successful in Egypt as mounting social and political opposition decreased the ability of the government to maintain economic reforms and negotiate an IMF loan and the existence of alternative resources created disincentives. Furthermore, not only pointing out the importance of 'alternative funds' and the ` domestic political environment' with regard to the demand side of the IMF loans, this article also debates the relative strengths of the variables, and argues that alternative funds matter more than the domestic political environment.

Subject Keywords

Political Science and International Relations, Geography, Planning and Development, Development

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/64303

Journal

JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/13629387.2016.1195268

Collections

Department of International Relations, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Rethinking the Tunisian miracle: a party politics view Yardimci-Geyikci, Sebnem; Tür Küçükkaya, Özlem (Informa UK Limited, 2018-01-01) Five years on from the Tunisian revolution, Tunisia stands as the sole success story of the Arab Spring. The country since then has managed to adopt a pluralist and democratic constitution, and held three free and fair elections. Accordingly, in the eyes of several observers, Tunisia is now in the process of consolidating its new democracy. However, the reality on the ground seems much gloomier, as most recent opinion surveys suggest that there is a significant degree of dissatisfaction, not only with polit...
Europeanization of foreign policy: the case of Turkish foreign policy towards the Black Sea region Ustun, Cigdem (Informa UK Limited, 2010-01-01) Turkey's efforts to initiate an active foreign policy towards the Black Sea region in the 1990s were scuttled by Russian influence and an international environment inconducive to multilateralism. When security needs changed in the twenty-first century and the enlargement of the EU reached the Black Sea, a multilateral approach was developed for the region by local and international actors, i.e., the EU and Turkey. In this framework, this article aims to show the changes observed in Turkish foreign policy to...
European Union approaches to fostering synergies of cooperation and integration around the Black Sea Gultekin-Punsmann, Burcu; Nikolov, Krassimir Y. (Informa UK Limited, 2008-06-01) Following the European Union's (EU) eastern enlargement and debates on the Constitutional Treaty, the Black Sea region has received increasing political, public and scholarly attention. This article examines the prospects for and the forms of economic and political cooperation in the area from the perspective of the EU as well as of the local actors. The macroeconomic situation in the region is analysed as a major factor for commercial and economic cooperation. The complex network of existing trade agreemen...
Internally displaced persons and the Cyprus peace process Psaltis, Charis; Cakal, Huseyin; Loizides, Neophytos; Kuşçu Bonnenfant, Işık (SAGE Publications, 2020-01-01) The article focuses on Greek Cypriot internally displaced persons and their attitudes towards the island's reunification talks. We utilize quantitative data from two representative sample surveys, conducted in 2016-2017, which probed respondents on their views on territorial readjustments, property provisions and power-sharing. Contrary to the current findings in the literature, internally displaced persons status is associated with higher levels of support for a negotiated peace settlement. The article exa...
Regime change in Turkey Polat, Necati (Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2013-05-01) A series of critical developments in Turkish politics from 2007 has signalled a historic shift in the use of power in the country, long controlled by the staunch and virtually autonomous bureaucracy, both military and civilian, in the face of fragile civilian politics. A unique leverage used by civilian politics in bringing about the change has been the discourse of Europeanization. Originally a project that was part and parcel of the identity politics of the bureaucracy from the nineteenth century, the dis...

Citation Formats

M. Hecan, “Comparative political economy of the IMF arrangements after the Arab uprisings: Egypt and Tunisia,” JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES, pp. 765–793, 2016, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/64303.