Chronicles of a Death Foretold: Democracy and Dedevelopment in Tunisia

– Exogenous shocks of different types cost the Tunisian economy billions in foregone growth and deprived it of critical foreign currency receipts. Pushing the current account into deeper deficits, exogenous shocks made the country’s leadership increasingly beholden to foreign creditors.

– Tunisia’s dependence on external sources of debt and equity financing combined with its subordinate position within the global financial system to limit policy choice considerably during the transition. Access to non-market sources of finance offered a brief reprieve from these restraints, though ultimately introduced conditionalities and systems of surveillance sufficient to ensure a significant degree of compliance with creditor wishes.

– Tunisia’s subordinate position within the international monetary system led to the Banque Centrale de Tunisie’s hoarding of FX reserves and eventual hiking of interest rates. The former contributed to the deterioration of the country’s international investment position, the latter to wage compression, low labor demand, and low investment levels.

– Tunisia’s dominant partisan actors not only afforded the country’s wealthiest persons direct access to the political domain and the policymaking process; they also facilitated these persons’ acquisition of assets seized from the Trabelsi clan.

– As a result of the modality of business-state relations consolidated post-2011, Tunisia’s markets remain exceedingly concentrated and non-competitive. A small number of family-owned holding companies dominate nearly every sector of the economy.

– Policy decisions in the domains of industrial, investment and trade proved suboptimal, doing little to open up new external markets or move export-oriented industries into higher value activities.

– Fiscal policy decisions have been alternatively regressive or inefficient. The public revenues system evinces clear social biases while expenditure strategies have been largely devoid of a developmental rationality.

– Economic underperformance became politically salient through its labor market and income effects. Enduring deficiencies on the demand side of the labor market meant the volume and quality of job creation remained woefully inadequate throughout the duration of the past decade, condemning a significant majority to the indignities and precarity of unemployment, informal employment and economic disengagement. Compensation being at least loosely tied to productivity, the private sector’s malaise simultaneously kept wages outside the orbit of the state low, while inflation erased much of the gains yielded by minimum wage hikes and collective bargaining.