Working Paper on Understanding Yemen's Economy
This working paper, authored by Richard Barltrop, TPP Associate and LSE Middle East Centre visiting senior fellow, explores how the prevailing picture of Yemen's economy is incomplete and misleading. Economic estimates ignore between half and two-thirds of the country. Analyses overlook Yemen’s relative strengths in infrastructure, agriculture and remittances, and overestimate the importance of oil and gas. This inaccurate picture of Yemen’s economy, which ignores the political context, has significant consequences. It contributes to an international misapprehension, whereby the country’s economy is seen primarily in terms of precarity and humanitarian emergency, with capabilities and resilience under-recognised.
The paper makes four recommendations to the international community:
1. Take a political economy perspective, combining analysis of Yemen’s economy with an understanding of the actual political and governance situation in the country.
2. Move away from unexamined assumptions and clichés about Yemen, and instead find and use new sources of data.
3. Draw on more accurate understandings of Yemen’s economy to contribute to peace efforts.
4. Use these fuller understandings to rebalance assistance to Yemen, with a shift from humanitarian towards development and peace-supporting aid.
Policy and Practice Brief 21: Pathways of Change
Our new Policy and Practice Brief by TPP Directors Gareth Williams and Neil McCulloch sets out the Pathways of Change framework, a practical link between political economy analysis and action. Using examples from Ghana and Thailand, it shows how external partners can support change driven by domestic actors, based on a realistic analysis of how change might happen.
Can we still achieve peace?
On the day US troops formally withdrew from Iraq, TPP Principal Niki Palmer asks if we can still achieve peace and suggests how to improve peacebuilding interventions.
Podcast: Subsidies and Social Protection - Reforms for a Sustainable Transition
Why are subsidies so difficult to reform, even when more effective alternatives exist? In this podcast by Socialprotection.org, TPP Director Neil McCulloch examines the political, institutional and economic challenges that have made subsidy reform one of the most complex issues in social policy.