The Influence of Social and Political Changes on Economic Thought: A Case Study of Middle East Economics using Advanced Computational Text Analysis

One legacy of the Arab Spring was creating a more explicit recognition of the importance of political and social factors among economists. Around 2010-12, the region was rocked by tumultuous social unrest and political upheavals that brought down long-established autocracies across the region (Hakimian, 2017). These events also signified how economists were unprepared, arguably ill-prepared, to predict or explain, these major events.1 A corollary of this anomalous situation was to what extent economic thinking and policy in the MENA region had to adapt subsequently under the influence of these developments. As Hakimian (2021)2 has argued, “Knowledge of Middle Eastern economies as an autonomous field within economics is of relatively recent origins and has evolved in uneven ways.” Approached from this perspective, the influence of socio-political and institutional changes in shaping Middle East economists’ perspectives is of additional significance. A quick analysis of the literature indicates that a broader range of topics moved centre stage, including poverty and inequality, the role of religion, crony capitalism, governance, gender, impacts of conflict and forced displacements, to mention a few. Extending our earlier work (Hakimian, 2021) and George Mikros (2015)3, this project uses novel techniques to address two inter-related intellectual curiosities: (a) to examine the influence of socio-economic and political contexts on knowledge construction in the economics as a social science discipline over the past three decades (both in theoretical and applied contexts); and (b) to examine if other than borrowing external ideas, the region has also contributed to the growth and maturity of economic development theories and policies. The proposed research draws from two hitherto unrelated disciplines: history of economic thought with reference to the MENA region, and digital humanities techniques (computational text analysis using topic modelling and distant reading approaches) to interrogate the evolution and scope of MENA economics as a sub-discipline within applied development economics and regional studies. The significance of the study is: (a) it stretches the boundaries of the history of economic thought in our region to incorporate discourse analysis and distant reading methodology; and (b) it puts the MENA region on the research map by applying state of the art computational methodology to generate new insights for regional studies.

Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU)