Breaking the Barriers to Higher Economic Growth: Better Governance and Deeper Reforms in the Middle East and North Africa

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World Bank Publications, Jan 1, 2007 - Business & Economics - 500 pages
The world's attention to the countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has often been dominated by headline issues: conflict, sanctions, political turmoil, and rising oil prices. Little of this international attention has considered the broad range of development challenges facing this diverse group of countries. Breaking the Barriers reflects the collected thinking of the World Bank's Office of the Chief Economist for the MENA Region on the long-term development challenges facing the region and the reform priorities and strategies for effectively meeting these challenges. It.
 

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Page 456 - ... strength and expertise to govern without drastic changes in policy or interruptions in government services...
Page 106 - Schumpeter (1950, p. 269) defined democracy in terms of electoral competition: "the democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people
Page 418 - This statistic has a %2 distribution with degrees of freedom equal to the number of restrictions in the system, which is in turn equal to one times the number of lags.
Page 427 - ... the respect of citizens and the state for the institutions that govern economic and social interactions among them" (Kaufmann, Kraay and Zoido-Lobaton, 2002: 4-5).
Page 457 - ... 12. Is there equality of opportunity, which includes freedom from exploitation by or dependency on landlords, employers, union leaders, bureaucrats or any other type of denigrating obstacle to a share of legitimate economic gains?
Page 429 - Law" subcomponent provides an "assessment of the strength and impartiality of the legal system," while the "Order" subcomponent concerns the "popular observance of the law.
Page 458 - ... actual or potential impact on governance. The highest rating is given to those countries ". . . where there is no armed opposition to the government and the government does not indulge in arbitrary violence, direct or indirect, against its own people." The lowest rating is given to a country embroiled in an ongoing civil war and/or facing terrorist attacks.
Page 457 - ... 3. Are there free trade unions and peasant organizations or equivalents, and is there effective collective bargaining? Are there free professional and other private organizations?
Page 456 - Is there protection from police terror, unjustified imprisonment, exile, or torture, whether by groups that support or oppose the system? Is there freedom from war and insurgencies?
Page 457 - Do the people have the right to organize in different political parties or other competitive political groupings of their choice, and is the system open to the rise and fall of these competing parties or groupings?

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