encourage the diversification of exports out of the petroleum sector, could also have a disproportionate impact on opportunities for women.

76. Measures to boost public sector employment for women would also help. One sensible measure might be for states to invest their resource revenues more heavily in economic sectors that have traditionally hired more women, like education and health, and hence can raise female labor force participation without violating the cultural norms that sustain gender-segmented labor markets in the MENA region. Equally important are policies that make it easier for women to join the labor force by curtailing gender discrimination, and encouraging generous family leave and child care measures.

# **7. Conclusions**

77. William Ascher‘s _Bringing in the Future_ (2009) has many important ideas for encouraging policymakers to adopt policies that have short-term political costs but long-term economic and social benefits. Will recent developments in the MENA region yield long-term benefits while minimizing political costs? The previous section presented some of the major structural issues inherent to MENA‘s rentier societies, yet the recent political upheavals associated with the Arab Spring may offer the promise for significant spates of governance and political economy reform. But the fluidity of the prevailing context, and looming economic shocks, is likely to challenge MENA‘s policymakers and political elites in significant ways. Moving beyond the rentier state associated particularly with oilendowments is likely to involve precarious transitions, including ones which may alter the historically observed conflict risks in the region.

78. PSM and PSD reforms can present valuable building blocks to enhancing the prospective political transitions in MENA, and potentially mitigating the risks of violent conflict. But development partners will need to be fully cognizant of the limited actual leverage they are likely to have in shaping these transitions, in particular in settings where resource rents are still integral to the overarching political economy equilibria. A recent World Bank (2010:x) stocktaking of Public Financial Management (PFM) reforms in the MENA region alerts one to the operational limitations of systematic political economy analysis (PEA) for informing engagement choices:

[At] its core PEA analysis embodies the important observation that political and bureaucratic factors matter. Would be reformers should not mechanistically seek to transfer approaches and practices that work well in one setting to other very different institutional contexts. Yet beyond this basic and sensible warning, the PEA literature has relatively little to contribute when it seeks to address the most important questions in any reform initiative: what should be done, when does it need to happen, who should do it and how. Each reform experience is unique and endogenous to a particular time and country, as well as to an individual set of political, bureaucratic, institutional and personal dynamics. PEA may be valuable in highlighting constraints or identifying potential supporters, and it can help to inform decisions about what is to be done. But the trajectories of the most successful reforms in MENA bear little resemblance to the type of recommendations that a typical donor supported PEA would generate. PEA is not a substitute for solid strategic decision-making, and even less for astute tactical maneuvering during implementation. More is likely to be gained by investing in 25