Why the Middle East is Economically Underdeveloped: Historical Mechanisms of Institutional Stagnation

摘要

A millennium ago, around roughly the tenth century, the Middle East was an economically advanced region of the world, as measured by standard of living, technology, agricultural productivity, literacy or institutional creativity. Only China might havebeen even more developed. Subsequently, however, the Middle East failed to match the institutional transformation through which western Europe vastly increased its capacity to pool resources, coordinate productive activities and conduct exchanges. True,the institutional endowment of the Middle East continued to evolve. But in certain areas central to economic modernization change was minimal, at least in relation to the structural transformation of the West and, for that matter, the Middle East's ownevolution during the early Islamic centuries. In eighteenth-century Cairo, credit practices hardly differed from those of the tenth century. Likewise, investors and traders were using enterprise forms essentially identical to those prevalent eight centuries earlier. By the nineteenth century, the entire Middle East was clearly "underdeveloped" relative to western Europe and its offshoots in the new world; and by the twenty-first century, it had fallen markedly behind parts of the Far East as well.