Middle East Research and Information Project

Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971

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Karen Pfeifer

Karen Pfeifer is professor emerita of economics at Smith College and vice chair of MERIP’s board of directors.

Current Analysis

Breaking Even, Breaking Down or Going for Broke?

As of mid-May 2015, crude oil prices had fallen to the lowest level in recent years, under $60 a barrel for US domestic benchmark West Texas Intermediate (WTI) and about $66 a barrel for the international Brent benchmark [http://www.oil-price.net/]. These market prices are compared to several types

Karen Pfeifer • 6 min read

MER Article

Rebels, Reformers and Empire

For 20 years leading up to the uprisings of 2010-2011, Egypt and Tunisia suffered the ill effects of neoliberal economic reform, even as the international financial institutions and most economists hailed them as beacons of progress in the Arab world. For ten years preceding the revolts, workers and

Karen Pfeifer • 21 min read

Current Analysis

Why Isn't the "Swing Producer" Swinging?

The price of oil is hovering around $50 per barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude, and $60 per barrel of Brent crude, the lowest levels since the global economic downturn [http://www.merip.org/mer/mer252] of 2008-2009. Until the end of February, when they rebounded slightly, oil prices had been dr

Karen Pfeifer • 3 min read

MER Article

Gulf Juggernaut

Adam Hanieh, Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

Karen Pfeifer • 6 min read

MER Article

Petrodollars at Work and in Play in the Post-September 11 Decade

What does one do with a $1.3 trillion windfall? That was the cumulative value of current account surpluses that flushed into the Arab region from 2000 to 2008, according to the International Monetary Fund. The main source was hydrocarbon export revenues, thanks to the rise in demand for oil

Karen Pfeifer • 21 min read

MER Article

Kuwait's Economic Quandary

Aiming to restore Kuwait's historic role as a hub of trade in the Persian Gulf, a member of the ruling family is spearheading a team to consider the deepening of economic ties with Iran and, eventually, with Iraq. Sheikh Nasser Sabah al-Ahmad Al Sabah's effort to

Karen Pfeifer • 8 min read

MER Article

How Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan and Even Egypt Became IMF "Success Stories" in the 1990s

Just as European missionaries were the spiritual handmaidens of nineteenth-century colonialism, so has the International Monetary Fund (IMF) assumed a modern-day mission in support of world trade, finance and investment. The mission aims to convert the benighted heathen in developing countries to th

Karen Pfeifer • 12 min read

MER Article

Reform or Reaction?

This issue of Middle East Report presents critical -- and timely -- analysis of the impact of neoliberal economic policies in the Middle East and North Africa. Authors representing a variety of disciplines and viewpoints explore the dilemmas confronting progressive forces searching for alternative p

Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, Marsha Pripstein Posusney, Karen Pfeifer, Steve Niva • 4 min read

MER Article

To Clear the Minefield

Irene Gendzier, Notes from the Minefield: United States Intervention in Lebanon and the Middle East, 1945-1958 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). With the February 1998 news that the Clinton administration was preparing unilateral military action against Iraq, sectors of the US public see

Karen Pfeifer • 6 min read

MER Article

Development Revisited

Berch Berberoğlu, The Political Economy of Development: Theory and the Prospects for Change in the Third World (SUNY, 1992). Timothy Morris, The Despairing Developer: Diary of an Aid Worker in the Middle East (I. B. Tauris, 1991). “Development” is a quintessentially American concept, smacking of t

Karen Pfeifer • 5 min read

MER Article

Class Acts in the Middle East

Berch Berberoglu, ed., Power and Stability in the Middle East (Zed, 1989). Alan Richards and John Waterbury, A Political Economy of the Middle East: State, Class and Economic Development (Westview, 1990).

Karen Pfeifer • 8 min read

MER Article

Letter from Jordan

“Can you help me get a job in the United States?” “We like Saddam because he is a man of his word: He stood up to the Kuwaiti cheaters and now he is standing up to foreign domination and US intervention in the Arab world.” I heard these two statements repeatedly -- often from the same person -- dur

Karen Pfeifer • 3 min read