S\u00e3o Paulo \u2013 The deputy managing director at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Nemat Shafik, stated in her last article in the institution\u2019s blog, published on Friday (18), that the countries of the Middle East and North Africa need to live an \u201ceconomic spring\u201d. According to the executive, the nations in the region must diversify their economies, invest in infrastructure, generate jobs and seek growth. She said that she was impressed, in a recent visit, on hearing almost all people speak about politics, but almost nobody about economics, which she considers \u201ca worry\u201d.<\/p>\n
According to Shafik, the situation is the most serious, though not limited to, the countries that do not produce oil. According to her, among these nations, almost all economic indices are heading in the wrong direction. \u201cGrowth halved, unemployment rose, reserves came under pressure and deficits ballooned as governments responded to social pressures by increasing spending on wages and generalized subsidies,\u201d said the executive.<\/p>\n
She recalls that in the 90s, the main European economies made use of the economic moment to help the European countries that were living a transition and stated that many Arab countries also need to live changes. At the moment, different from that time, there is no foreign credit available. \u201cNew governments across the region are keen to respond to the demand for jobs and justice that brought them to power but are quickly faced with the hard reality of limited resources and powerful vested interests.\u201d<\/p>\n
She also said that the talks that should be in the agendas of leaders in the region do not figure among the priorities of governments. She asks, for example, how to reduce the volume of subsidies granted to the poorest to make it possible to free funds for investment in education and infrastructure, and what governments have been doing to guarantee minimum quality levels to the poor. She also asks what measures have been adopted to allow the private initiative to create between 50 million and 75 million over the next ten years. \u201cUnfortunately, there is not yet any real discourse about these issues,\u201d she finished off.<\/p>\n
The executive warns to the concern with Arab youths. According to Shafik, they are concerned with the business environment, with the access they have to education and jobs and with the transparency adopted by local governments. \u201cThis visit to the region has made me more convinced that without an \u2018Economic Spring\u2019 to accompany the \u2018Arab Spring\u2019 and the important political transitions taking place in the Arab region, we risk failure on both fronts.\u201d<\/p>\n
*Translated by Mark Ament<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The deputy managing director at the IMF, Nemat Shafik, stated that the countries of the Middle East and North Africa must generate more jobs, reduce deficits and seek growth of their economies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2316,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-41535","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-economy"},"wps_subtitle":"The deputy managing director at the IMF, Nemat Shafik, stated that the countries of the Middle East and North Africa must generate more jobs, reduce deficits and seek growth of their economies.","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2316"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41535"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41535\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}