Middle East situation "fragile": World Bank chief
Baku, February 3 (AZERTAC). The situation in the Middle East is "fragile" with countries like Egypt and Tunisia caught in a dilemma of "partial modernization" in which the political system does not allow the masses to benefit from economic advances, the head of the World Bank said on Wednesday.
Interviewed by phone from Berlin as riots raged across Egypt, World Bank President Robert Zoellick said the lender was ready to move quickly to support nations in the region as they press forward with economic and political reforms.
"We are in a very fragile situation, not only for Egypt but for a number of countries across the Middle East," he told Reuters.
"It is extremely difficult at this point to read exactly what will happen" in Egypt, Zoellick said, adding that implementing economic and social reforms while political unrest rages was especially difficult. "Doing reforms in a midst of a revolution is a tricky prospect," he said.
Nine days of anti-government protests in Egypt took a violent turn on Wednesday when supporters of President Hosni Mubarak clashed with demonstrators who want an immediate end to his 30-year rule.
The uprising spread from Tunisia, where weeks of protests against poverty, repression and corruption toppled President Zine al-Abdine Ben Ali after 23 years in power. Protests have also hit Algeria, Jordan and Yemen.
Egypt has enjoyed stronger growth than most Arab nations and it has a relatively low level of poverty by international standards.
The problem, Zoellick suggested, was that countries like Tunisia and Egypt did not press forward aggressively enough with modernizing their economies after putting in place basic building blocks of growth, leaving a high level of unemployment, especially among youths.
"What we have seen is a partial modernization process ... at the stage of developing the ports, the infrastructure, the industrial zones, in creating those jobs to move up the value-added ladder these countries did not move far enough, nor fast enough," he said.
Zoellick said one of the lessons from the tensions in the Middle East was that economic reforms were not always enough.
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