Outcomes

Some of the (unplanned) outcomes of the workshop:

1. Development aid distorts service provision by state. I would say it distorts the market, but services should not be on the market. Governments have a DUTY to provide services to the citizen. Development aid make states want to get all its services implemented through aid programs. The State stops doing anything to serve its citizen until the services system crumbles and donors step in. Meanwhile the regime pockets all the money it can lay its hands on, or diverts it to private goals.

2. Many young bourgeois technocrats in the Arab World are natural born neo-liberals. I'm not sure why. Is it intellectual laziness, because the doctrine is so simplistic: you're worth what you produce, every man (and woman) for him/herself and Market for all? Is it because most originate from well-off families, have had servants since their childhood and consider this to be a natural state of affairs and do not bulk at inequalities and injustice (except when they cannot afford the latest Bulgari watch)? It must be intellectual laziness: most have not found out about the market debacle yet.