The Economics of the Middle East: A Comparative Approach.

• Author: Rauch, James E.

The Economics of the Middle East: A Comparative Approach is a seminal work by James E. Rauch on the regional economics of the Arab countries, Iran, and Turkey. Rauch sets out a broad comparison of the Middle East's economics in ten informative chapters that cover micro, macro, and political economics, as well as development perspectives. Rauch scrutinizes the historical perspectives of human development, focusing on issues of education, health, demographics and gender, and presents each sample country's macro performance.

To start with, Rauch provides geographical and conceptual definitions (e.g., Iran as the other fuel-endowed country and Turkey as the other Mediterranean), and explains the scope of the book. Rauch defines the issue of intensive and extensive growth through the use of secondary data. In this part, the Middle East countries are categorized as developed and developing in terms of their intensive or extensive growth trajectories. Based on this division, the backwardness of the Arab countries is attributed to their inability to industrialize. Therefore, for the author, insufficient education and health service have prevailed in the Arab region as oil became an essential source of income for the fuel-endowed Arab countries after World War II (p. 52).

In a similar vein, the book presents some descriptive information on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region's intensive growth by referring to international trade, foreign direct investment, rents, and total natural resources in the following sections. Rauch notes that intensive growth in Turkey, Egypt, and Morocco began with industrialization, whereas in most countries in the Arab world it began with tourism and fuel exports (p. 56).

Rauch accentuates the region's human capital by linking education with economic growth. He argues that education in the Arab countries, Iran, and Turkey is quite successful in terms of quantity but not quality (p. 92). In addition to education, Rauch affiliates demographic transition with economic growth, noting that it is too early to define a positive transmission in this region's demography in terms of contributing to economic growth (p. 119).

Giving a detailed discussion of the equalities in Middle Eastern societies, Rauch analyzes the gender gap in education and labor force participation between women and men in the region. According to secondary data, he finds that except for Sub-Saharan African countries, girls catch up with boys in...