Protests and Economic Development in Jordan

For the second week in a row, a diverse array of Jordanians mobilized in the streets of Amman and other cities to protest economic conditions in Jordan. Similar to last week’s Jordanian Day of Anger, the recent protests were organized and followed through with despite government attempts to appease popular discontent in the days preceding the planned protests. Contrary to last week’s mobilizations which focused on rising prices, protesters this week were much more direct in decrying “policies that impoverish and starve” the citizens of Jordan. Furthermore, unlike last week, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) participated in the protests.

As mentioned in a previous post, the problem was never simply one of rising prices. The fundamental problem lies in the inability of the general public to meet their basic needs within the given economic configurations of Jordan. The existing economic development model in Jordan has failed to provide adequate employment, income, and purchasing power to the average citizen. While both the regime and the government have taken steps to alleviate some of the most immediate symptoms of the problem, there has been little indication that the principles underlying these symptoms are being subject to serious reconsideration. However, the failure to engage in such reconsideration should not point to an inevitable challenge to the existing political economy. While protesters have sharpened their criticisms of the economic conditions in Jordan, the discursive  separation between government and regime - as well as between economic conditions and the development model - persist.

To be sure, state measures over the past two weeks are significant indicators of the level of concern Jordanian authorities are experiencing in the wake of country-wide demonstrations, escalating mobilizations in other Arab states, and the fall of the regime in Tunisia. Prior to last week’s protests, the Jordanian government took several measures, including eliminating fuel taxes, easing hiring requirements within the public sector, and subsidizing the price of basic foods at the military and civilian cooperatives. This past Thursday, the government implemented another set of measures, including a JD20 (approximately $30) increase in the monthly salary of public sector employees (both civilian and military). The increase also applies to the pensions of retired public sector employees. The first monthly installment of the increase is to be disbursed on January 30, which (not coincidentally) happens to be the birthday of King Abdullah II. Other steps include the lowering of interest rates on certain existing loans as well as a 2011 moratorium on tariffs for electricity consumption under 500 kilowatts a month.

Public relations efforts have complimented the economic course of action undertaken by the regime and government during the past two weeks. During the most recent protests, Public Security personnel were seen distributing water bottles to protesters in Amman. On Thursday, a live debate was broadcast on Jordanian Television between the Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of State, and Government Spokesperson, Ayman al-Safadi, and the Secretary General of the Islamic Action Front (IAF), Hamzah Mansour. The significance of such a debate should be clear given the rarity of government officials publically discussing issues with the opposition, as well as the fact that the IAF boycotted the 2010 Jordanian Parliamentary Elections.

Perhaps most interesting and representative vis-à-vis the strategies of both the regime and the government are calls for safety and security. In several public statements, Prime Minister Samir al-Rifa’i, and many others, repeatedly called for al-amn wa al-amanah (translated “safety and security”). Such calls for public safety were rarely justified or buttressed by the threat of force on the part of the Jordanian Gendarmerie Force (though that threat rarely needs to be explicitly made). Rather, Rifa’i and others have claimed that ‘safety and security’ are the lynchpin of Jordan’s economic future. In a radio interview with Amn FM (a government-affiliated radio station), Rifa’i went on to argue that Jordan has little in the way of natural resources and that its economic wellbeing is dependent on investment, both local and foreign.

The discussion of safety and security within an overall strategy of securing investments is indicative of the continued denial (within the dominant discourse of policy-makers and commentators alike) that poverty, unemployment, and a lack of adequate purchasing power are structural features of the economic development model underway in Jordan (not to mention the rest of the Arab world). This is despite the fact that the empirical record points to an overall rise in poverty and unemployment rates in Jordan throughout the past two decades. Instead, many liberal elites (whether state officials or private citizens) continue to reference rising global prices as the primary source of economic dislocation in the country. This is part of a problematic trend in Jordanian public discourse of implying that the socio-economic problems facing the Jordanian population are epiphenomenal to the country's development strategy. I've argued elsewhere that this explains the broader phenomenon wherein many amongst official and unofficial circles in Jordan simultaneously argue for the deepening of market-oriented reforms as well as the alleviation of poverty and unemployment. Lost within this idea is the way in which deepening poverty, expanding unemployment, and decreasing purchasing power are structural features of the unraveling of Jordan’s state-centered economy and the institutionalization of a neoliberal economic development strategy. In line with such prescriptions, many of Jordan's elites continue to focus on the growth rate of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – ranging between four and seven percent over the past several years – as evidence of sound economic policy. Furthermore, they point to the vestiges of the social safety guarantees offered by the Jordanian state, as well as the recent measures in the face of wide-spread protests, as obstacles to fiscal responsibility (i.e., closing the budget deficit) and economic development (i.e., growth in GDP).

To be clear, the heart of the problem in Jordan’s economy is the nexus of poverty, unemployment, and weak purchasing power on the part of the majority of its citizens. This nexus has been produced by the emphasis on investment in non-productive sectors and enterprises that offer little real added value to the economy while providing quick and large returns to those select Jordanians with privileged access to such investment arrangements. This has been accompanied by a misplaced faith in the alleged trickle-down effects of the market (i.e., when the market economy grows, everybody benefits), which in turn justifies the exclusive concern with growth rates.  Such principles and policies of economic development have been decided and implemented by those at the commanding heights of both the polity and the economy. While Rifa'i and his cabinet are sure to eventually give way to a different set of politicians as previous governments have, the problem is one of structures and not of personalities. While medium- to long-term solutions might not necessarily be found in a continuation and/or increase in state subsidies, it makes little sense to abandon such protections against the vagaries of the “free market” in the short-run. Absent a genuine reconsideration of the existing development model underway in Jordan, such suggestions are simply justifications for wealth disparities, exclusionary economics, and discursive elitism.

A genuine reconsideration of Jordan's economic development strategy would require the regime, the government, and commentators to move away from self-congratulatory celebrations of issues such as Jordan's rankings in The Heritage Foundation’s 2010 Economic Freedom Report. Indices such as “Business Freedom”, “Financial Freedom”, and “Trade Freedom” ultimately measure the ability of capital to move in and out of the borders of Jordan and to circulate amongst its economic elites. It makes no difference to the average citizen that Jordan’s economy is ranked the 38th freest in the world and 4th freest in the Middle East and North Africa. Such rankings (and their celebration) render invisible the daily experiences of the average Jordanian. Alternatively, it would do us all some good to consider that Jordan ranks in the bottom thirty percent globally, in terms of both poverty and unemployment – meaning that seventy percent of the countries in the world have lower rates of poverty and unemployment than Jordan does. According to official government statistics, the average rates of poverty and unemployment in Jordan over the past few years are approximately thirteen percent each. Unofficial estimations of poverty and unemployment are a good five to ten percent higher. Irrespective of these conflicting estimations, such statistics are especially striking given that poverty and unemployment are not correlated in Jordan – meaning that most of the poor are employed and most of the unemployed are not poor. The structural causes of this dynamic and its broader implications will be the subject of a future post.