JICA-RI and the Brookings Institution Launch the Second-Year Joint Research on Inclusive Growth after the Arab Spring

On January 30 and 31, JICA-RI Research Fellow Suguru Miyazaki and Research Associate Akira Murata held consultations for the second-year joint research on “After the Arab Spring: Inclusive Growth in the Middle East and the North Africa Regions” at the Brookings Institution in the U.S.

JICA has been engaged in discussion on its future aid approaches in this region, offering recommendations on new policies and institutions for the governments in the region for advancing the joint research on the above theme. In this context, JICA has been conducting a three-year joint research project since February 2012 with the Brookings Institution, which has abundant expertise and influence on the study of Middle East region. During the first year of the project, JICA-RI Research Fellow Takako Yuki and Research Assistant Yuriko Kameyama wrote a paper on education in Yemen, and presented the findings from the paper at a seminar in Washington DC this January.

During the consultations, with Mr. Hafez Ghanem, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, Miyazaki and Murata exchanged their opinions on the following issues: the transformation triggered by the Arab Spring still in the developing stage; need to analyze the factors behind the emergence of the Arab Spring for continuing their support in the long term; recommendation of strategies for reforming the bloated public sector and improving the investment environment.

Furthermore, as a policy proposal for youth employment, it was suggested that the Arab region could learn from experiences in Southeast Asia including Indonesia, where the proportion of the young among the working-age population in the 1970s was even higher than that in the Middle East and North Africa countries today.

These discussions led to the agreement that one of the themes for its second year joint research project will be “a comparative study of job preferences among the youth in Egypt and Indonesia, aiming at policy recommendations for the Middle East countries drawing on South Asian experience.