Book Review: Tunisia’s Economic Development: Why Better than Most of the Middle East but Not East Asia NabliMKNugentJB (2023) Tunisia’s Economic Development: Why Better than Most of the Middle East but Not East Asia. Routledge. 387 pp. ISBN 9781032313993 (hbk), 9781032314006 (pbk). https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003309550

Few countries in the Middle East and North Africa pose a development puzzle as instructive as Tunisia.For decades, it appeared to be one of the region's most credible non-oil success stories: outward-oriented, socially progressive, relatively stable, and meaningfully ahead of many peers on indicators of education, health, and poverty reduction.Yet the same country that outperformed much of MENA never came close to reproducing the transformative growth achieved by East Asian economies of comparable starting conditions.More paradoxically still, the democratic breakthrough of 2011-long imagined as the missing ingredient-coincided not with economic renewal, but with stagnation, institutional erosion, and deepening public disillusionment.Mustapha K Nabli and Jeffrey B Nugent's Tunisia's Economic Development: Why Better than Most of the Middle East but Not East Asia offers the most rigorous and comprehensive account of this paradox yet produced, and, in doing so, raises questions that extend well beyond any single country.The authors bring formidable credentials to the task.Nabli has served as Professor of Economics at the University of Tunis, Minister of Planning and Economic Development, Chief Economist for the MENA Region at the World Bank, and Governor of the