Abstract
Since the early 1980s, in the so-called post-oil boom era, the economies of the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA) have faced major adjustment problems that have substantially slowed the growth of the regional economy as a whole.1 The required adjustments and the constraints on economic growth since the 1980s can best be analyzed in the context of the experience of growth during the oil boom years. The MENA countries achieved high rates of GDP growth and rapid structural change during the 1960s and the 1970s—some of the fastest rates of growth in the world economy. This applied to output growth rates in all the main sectors of the economy in almost all the individual countries in the region as well as the average growth rates for the region as a whole (Karshenas, 1996).
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