Economic Development in Tunisia: Reality and Prospects

Unpublished working paper, prepared during postgraduate study at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. The full text is in Arabic and available as a PDF from the top of this page.

Abstract

The paper examines economic development in Tunisia over 1970–2019, reading the state of the Tunisian economy through its principal macroeconomic indicators, analysed in tables and charts, and offering proposals for meeting its development challenges.

Themes

Income and growth — per-capita income and output compared with income levels in developing countries and the region, alongside growth rates and economic structure, and Tunisia's standing on the Human Development Index relative to regional peers.

Poverty and income distribution — poverty levels over the past thirty years, the policies pursued against it and how far they succeeded, and the distribution of income and patterns of poverty by geography and gender.

External finance — levels and patterns of external and total debt, foreign direct investment and aid, the evolution of FDI policy and its role, sources of debt, and the scale of aid and its developmental effect.

Relations with the international institutions — a historical reading of Tunisia's relationship with the World Bank and the IMF: the scale and type of loans and grants received, the effect of that relationship on economic policy across the period, whether it proved beneficial, and how it might be developed.

Recommendations

The paper closes with proposals for overcoming developmental problems, including inclusive justice, popular participation and the preservation of social values; environmental balance and rationalised consumption; and a focus on education, training and both material and non-material incentives as keys to development, with cooperative arrangements in production, distribution and exchange, and attention to vertical development without neglecting the horizontal.