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The Middle East and North Africa: A New Social Contract for Development
Robert B. Zoellick President The World Bank Group The Peterson Institute for International Economics April 6, 2011

Introduction: What Just Happened? Sometimes there ismore to an event than its immediate consequences. The confiscation last December of the weighing scales from Mohamed Bouazizi’s fruit stand, how he was slapped by police in front of onlookers, how his attempt to complain was shrugged off, led this hurt and frustrated man to set himself on fire in public. The immediate consequence was to ignite a firestorm that engulfed Tunisia and the wider MiddleEast. Through Facebook, Tweets and social media, Bouazizi’s death brought down a regime whose official media would for days refer to his tragedy only as “the incident.” Tunisia, it turned out, had tens of thousands of Bouazizis. In fact, his like can be found everywhere in the world where men, women, and children are denied opportunity and hope because of poverty, social exclusion,disenfranchisement, and the arbitrary lack of law. But the lessons of Tunisia and the Middle East go far beyond a region, a country, or a marketplace. There is much more to the death of a fruit seller than the political convulsion shaking the region. There are lessons here for the region, for the world, for governments, for development institutions, and for economics.

Modernizing Multilateralism: Is the ArabWorld Different? Since I came to the World Bank in 2007, I have argued that we must “modernize multilateralism.” That means reforming international institutions, such as the World Bank Group and IMF, to better reflect the realities of the economic power shifts that are taking place in the world today; 1

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It means pressing our institutions to be faster, more flexible,more open and more attentive to clients; It means focusing on solving problems pragmatically, not just discussing the poor as objects of expert policies; It means democratizing development economics so that all can play a part in designing, executing, and continually improving development solutions; It means recognizing that organizations designed with mid-20th Century hierarchies need now tointerconnect nimbly across truly global networks – of governments, private businesses, civil society groups, other international agencies, and parliamentarians; It means not allowing a recourse to “multilateralism” to become an excuse for group inaction; we must make multilateralism work; And it means consigning the old labels of “first,” “second,” and “third” worlds to history, recognizing thatpresumptions that knowledge and power must flow from North to South, West to East, rich to poor, no longer hold. But consigning old labels to history is not the same as saying all countries and regions are the same. In 2007, attentive to just these differences, we launched an Arab World Initiative as one of the World Bank’s six strategic themes. Some questioned, why this focus? Speaking to our AnnualMeeting in 2007, I said, “One of the most notable challenges of our time is how to support those seeking to advance development and opportunities in the Arab World. In the past, these lands have been at the center of trade and learning, suggesting the potential if they can move beyond strife and barriers to growth and social development. Without broad-based growth, these countries will strugglewith social tensions and a large number of young people who cannot find jobs. “ The reasons for special attention to the Arab World seemed clear then and certain now: apart from the oil sector, the region is poorly integrated into the global economy. It has the highest unemployment among developing regions; the highest jobless rates among the best educated; the lowest economic participation rates...