|**Table 4.**Des<br>|criptive statis<br> <br>|tics of the 3<br>|-P indices for<br>|the MENA<br>|and OECD s<br>|amples<br>|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|Countries|Index<br><br>|Obs.|Mean|Sd.|Min.|Max.|
||P1<br><br>|266|0.48|0.17|0.13|0.79|
|MENA|P2<br><br>|235|0.20|0.08|0.02|0.46|
||P3<br><br>|247|0.31|0.10|0.06|0.55|
||P1<br><br>|532|0.79|0.12|0.43|0.96|
|OECD|P2<br>|437|0.32|0.07|0.11|0.69|
|<br>|P3<br> <br>|494<br> <br>|0.77<br> <br>|0.13<br> <br>|0.36<br> <br>|0.98<br> <br>|

A characteristic of the data that this figure clearly shows is that, for the nine countries examined above for illustrative purposes, the index (Provision), which, recall, is a composite index that measures the content as well as the quality of the delivered basket of PP2 telecommunication and Internet services, has steadily increased over time. As for the (Participation) index, which incorporates factors reflecting the extent to which a society is on a PP3 democratic path, its evolution is not uniform across these nine countries. The situations that seem unequivocal are those of Tunisia, where this index has been steadily increasing, and Egypt, Lebanon and the Syrian Arab Republic, where it has been declining in trend. This index remained relatively stable for the other five countries, namely Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia, with slight declines at certain periods.<sup>33,34</sup> These observations on the relationship between and give us a sense of what the quality of the SC in MENA could be, a question that we will investigate at length in the next PP2 PP3 section. We should, however, incorporate the third index used to represent an SC, namely, (Protection) in this preliminary analysis. As, on average, an OECD country has outperformed PP1 a MENA country on all three indices (see Table 4), we determine the three-dimensional vector representation of the SC of these two "average" countries and track the way the distance between these two vectors, hence the distance between the two average countries' SCs, has

> 33 It is then interesting to note that the fact that Iraq and Tunisia are considered as countries with a democratic tendency is not contradicted by Figure 2, whereas the same cannot be said for Lebanon. It is also worthwhile noting that the Syrian Arab Republic and Saudi Arabia have experienced a "scissors effect," i.e., in these countries the (Participation) curve was above the (Provision) curve and then the two curves crossed, and the former passed underneath the latter. However, in the Syrian Arab Republic, this effect occurred around the civil war period in 2011 PP3 due to a substantial drop of , whereas in Saudi Arabia it happened around 2008 due a jump of PP2 rather than a drop of . 34 Again, given that the period covered by our data ends in 2020, a note moderating the case of Tunisia deserves to PP3 PP2 be made here. Since a referendum in 2021, the country has turned to an authoritarian regime with political parties PP3 suspended and a president gaining full power while the parliament was frozen for 12 months. Figure 2 shows that Tunisia has experienced a sharp increase in Participation after the 4-week revolution that occurred between December 2010 and January 2011. We see from this figure that Participation has stabilized thereafter but, as indicated, things seem to have fallen apart beyond 2020 after the election of President Kaïs Saïed.

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