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The political economy of the MENA region remains among the least neoliberal internationally. State intervention and protection for select sectors and actors remains pervasive while elite-level insider cartels remain rooted in licensing, trade protection, and the allocation of subsidies. Labour markets are deeply divided between protected insiders and precarious outsiders. Dr Steffen Hertog’s recently published book, “Locked Out of Development: Insiders and Outsiders in Arab Capitalism”, discusses the economic and fiscal factors of a so-called segmented market economy that contribute to the low dynamism of low- to mid-income Arab economies. Dr Hertog focuses on core members of the region such as Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, pre-2011 Syria and pre-2015 Yemen, whose economic structures have not been influenced by major conflicts before the 2010s.
Joining the Forum in Cambridge, Dr Steffen Hertog and Dr Mehmet Erol will discuss Dr Hertog’s findings and the most important economic and fiscal policy challenges today’s Arab economies face.

Speakers:

Dr Steffen Hertog | Steffen Hertog is Associate Professor in Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics. He was previously Kuwait Professor at Sciences Po in Paris, lecturer in Middle East political economy at Durham University and a post-doc at Princeton University. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Oxford and MSc and M.A degrees from the School of Oriental Studies and the University of Bonn.
Dr Hertog’s main interest lies in Gulf and Middle East political economy, with a specific focus on the political economy of public sectors, state-business relations and labour markets. He has a subsidiary interest in issues of political violence in the Islamic world.
Books written and edited by Dr Hertog include Princes, Brokers and Bureaucrats: Oil and the State in Saudi Arabia; Labour Market, Unemployment and Migration in the GCC; Business Politics in the Middle East; Engineers of Jihad; and Locked Out of Development: Insiders and Outsiders in Arab Capitalism.

Dr Mehmet Erol | Mehmet Erman Erol is a political economist with a research focus on the (international) political economy of the MENA region. He received an MA in IPE (2011) and a PhD in Politics (2016), both from the University of York, UK.
At Cambridge, he is the convenor of the MPhil module ‘Political Economy of the Global South: Paradigms, Crises, Alternatives’. He also co-convenes the MSt IR module ‘IPE: Power, Politics, and Development in the Global Financial System’.
Dr Erol’s current research is on the rising significance of Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) in the global political economy; with a particular focus on Turkey’s recently established SWF.