Conclusion
NA’s economic decision-making is characterized by a long history of centralization and a topdown approach. During the Ottoman Empire, economic policy-making was interested to a grand Vizir, aided by a number of Vizirs who controlled all key state positions, received their policy input from Istanbul, and were loyal to the Sultan.
This changed somewhat during European control, which followed a more free market approach but with little input from the colonies. NA began its post-dependence era with a heavy dose of nationalism and socialism, based on state-led development and public sector enterprises. In the early 1980s, NA had to abandon its state-led development and was forced by IFIs to return to the fold of countries dominated by the neo-liberal formula. The outbreak of the Arab Spring seemed to have caused a change of policies in some areas but without leading to alternative economic thinking or a new development paradigm.The experience of the NA region suggests that the impact of economic ideas as pure theory has (at least in the short-run) been limited, and that changes in government economic policies are most often generated by factors outside the economics profession, even though the work produced by this profession is often used to bolster or negate certain existing tenets of belief. The impact of a single leader can be determinate on the economic policies selected, if not on the outcome of these policies, as can external bodies with sufficient power, but economic theory in itself is only moderately influential at best.