Senior fellow Charles Kenny was quoted in a International Business Times article on the Arab Spring and foreign aid.
From the Article
As the international community prepares to deploy aid for Egypt and Tunisia's ailing economies, it faces the daunting question of how to do so without perpetuating the endemic corruption and government monopolization that helped to spark the Arab Spring.
The protests that toppled Hosni Mubarak and Zine el Abidine-Ben Ali in part reflected popular frustration with soaring unemployment and a system that concentrated economic clout in the hands of the government and a small network of connected elites. Western nations and international institutions are mobilizing assistance to help stabilize Egypt and Tunisia, whose economies have been ravaged by revolution and an exodus of tourists. But there is a balance to be struck between immediate aid and facilitating broader economic changes.
"If you look at what lay behind the instability that was one of the sparks for the protests, the economic factors that lay behind it were a very high joblessness rate connected with a rather sclerotic private sector run by a few companies with very good connections to government," said Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. "There's a feeling that we need to move quickly, and yet some of these reforms by their very nature take time."