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Documentos
of Trunder the
Faculty of Economic and Enterprise Sciences |
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UNIVERSITY COMPLUTENSIAN OF MADRID |
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Iván MARTÍN*
The present work has been elaborated by Iván MARTIN, candidate of doctorate
of the Department of Applied Economy I of this Faculty, within the framework of
its investigations for the accomplishment of its doctoral thesis that I direct
on the impact in the countries of the Maghreb of the creation of a zone of free
commerce with the European Union, of next presentation. By the strategic
importance of the subject that studies for the Spanish economy and by its
analytical rigor, I consider that it deserves to be published like Document of
Work in this series.
Jesus of the Church
University professor of
University School
Dpto. Economic history
and Institutions I
February of 2003
"the
economic policy in Algeria (1999-2002):
towards an
economic solution to the crisis?”
Key words:
Classification
JEL: O5
Summary:
The Algerian
economic policy between 1999 and 2002 has obtained excellent results in terms
of control of basic the macroeconomic magnitudes, improving sensibly the
international solution of the country thanks mainly to the maintained increase
of the income for hydrocarbon exports. Nevertheless, those good results have
not contributed to improve the conditions of life (consumption, house, running water)
nor the economic perspective of the population (specially the use) nor to solve
the serious structural problems economic that must confront in the next years
(demographic evolution, nourishing dependency). Therefore, they have not
contributed to send a process of development economic nor to deactivate the
risk of social instability that characterizes to the country.
In this paper, a
critical analysis becomes of the options of economic policy of the governments
who have directed to Algeria during these three years and means (under the
Presidency of Abdelaziz Bouteflika), of their results and the advance of the
announced structural reforms, specially the implantation of the market economy,
the promotion of the private sector and the commercial opening.
Next, it is
analyzed which is the social base of those reforms and the degree of social
consensus and political that there is around them. Finally, a review becomes of
the main aspects of the economic policy that will determine to what extent this
one can contribute to offer a solution to the serious crisis that crosses
Algeria from 1988: question of the use, the creation of a zone of free commerce
with the European Union, the paper of the private sector and the
diversification of the exports, the foreign investment and the regulation of
the main national economic sector, the sector of hydrocarbons.
In this context,
the question of the viability of the reforms in a country dominated by the
informal economy considers and the circuits of accomplishment of parallel rents
to the market and the question of the interaction between economic reform and
political reform considers.
"Economic
Policy in Algeria (1999-2002):
Towards an
Economic Solution to the Crisis?”
Keywords:
JEL classification: O5
Abstract:
Algerian economic policy between 1999 and 2002 achieved
excellent results in terms of controlling the BASIC macroeconomic magnitudes,
appreciably improving the country's international solvency, thanks chiefly to
the sustained increase in the hydrocarbon export revenues. However, these
good results have not contributed to an improvement in living conditions
(consumption, housing, running to water) or in the population's economic
perspectives (especially employment), nor have structural they contributed to
resolving the serious economic problems that the country must phase in coming
years (demographic evolution, food dependence). These results have,
therefore, not contributed to launching to process of economic development nor
to deactivating the risk of social instability that hauts the country.
This to paper prograpevines to critical analysis of the
economic policy of the governments that have directed
Afterwards, the social base of these reforms and the degree
of social and political consensus about them plows analyzed. Finally, the
to paper reviews the main aspects of economic policy that will determines how
Officers' Club of Revolutionary Armed Forces this policy will contribute to
offering to solution to the serious crisis that Algeria you have been
undergoing since 1988: the issue of employment, the creation of to free trade
area with the European Union and its impact, the role of the private sector and
export diversification, foreign investment, and the regulation of the nation's
main economic sector, the hydrocarbon sector.
In this context, the to matter of the viability of the
reforms is raised, in informal a country dominated by the economy and the
circuits for perceiving rents that plows parallel to the market, ace well ace
the to matter of the interaction between economic reform and political reform.
THE ECONOMIC
POLICY IN ALGERIA (1999-2002):
TOWARDS An
ECONOMIC SOLUTION To The CRISIS?
Iván MARTÍN
- Introduction: the economic dimension
of a crisis multiforms
- The structural problems
- Demographic dynamics
- The material conditions of the life:
the water and the house
- The outer dependencies
3. the economic policy of the Bouteflika governments (1999-2002)
a. The economic strategy: solution as opposed to
development
b. The economic results
c. The Plan of Support to Economic Relaunching
2001-2004
4. the social base of the reforms and the definition of the
national interest
- Some key questions for the future:
towards an economic solution to the crisis?
- The question of the use
- The question of the opening
1) The Agreement of Association with the UE
2) The adhesion to the OMC
- The diversification of the exports
and the promotion of the PYMES
- The incognito of the foreign
investment
- The sector of hydrocarbons and its
sistémica function
- The institutional frame and the
paper of the State
- Conclusion
1. Introduction: the economic dimension of a crisis multiforms
Only some hours after have gain the victory of his party, the Front of
Liberacio'n Nacional (FLN), in the legislative elections of the 30 of May of
2002, Algerian Prime minister Ali Benflis, reiterated his previous declarations
on "the crisis multiforms that he crosses the country"[
1 ]. According to their own words, this
crisis "surpasses factual and the conjunctural thing and has a nature that
can get to affect of lasting form our future furthermost"[
2 ]. It is possible that one is the only case
in the world of a leader who indeed makes so radical declarations at the moment
at which he is arranged to follow one another... to itself.
But similar declarations are than just more if it is considered that only
two decades ago Algeria was admired like example to emulate by everybody Arab thanks
to its model of own development, with a powerful heavy industry and generous
social benefits (universal escolarización and medical assistance and gratuitous
medicines from 1973, right of the workers, prices to the consumption
subsidized, constructions of urban infrastructures) and a certain independence
with respect to the world-wide system capitalist maintained in the operation of
the hydrocarbons that I take to him to be one of the countries leaders of the
third-world alternative of the New Economic Order the International. At the
moment, Algeria has fallen until the last positions of the Arab world in terms
of indicators like unemployment, the society of the information or the
productivity.
One is one of the many paradoxes to which
there is customary Algeria to us. More recently, in the last three years the
main Algerian economic paradox is without doubt in the existing contradiction
between the macroeconomic exuberance of which the country makes finery thanks
to the height of the international prices of petroleum and the microeconomic
bankruptcy in which it is sunk, whose more eloquent manifestation is the
pauperización of more and more ample segments of the population. There am the
double departure point of any analysis here on the Algerian economic policy.
The situation summarized Economic the National Council and Social (CNES) at
the end of 2002: " economic and social conjuncture has not experimented [...] a
significant flexion, in spite of the consolidation of the financial bonanza
"[ 3 ]. In effect, the macroeconomic cleaning of the country
has not come accompanied by an improvement of the variables that directly
affect the population, like the use, the growth (and, therefore, the income of
the homes) or the access to public infrastructures. On the contrary, the
situation has not let worsen in the three last years, until the point of which
he is habitual between the analysts to speak of the "risk of social
explosion" in Algeria[ 4 ].
Nevertheless, the observation of the
Algerian reality offers exceeded reasons to maintain that this schizophrenia
between the macroeconomic success and the microeconomic failure already is
producing, day to day, a social explosion on credit. The displeasure of the
population has its imitation in the proliferation of scrambled and agitations
of all type[
5 ], frequently associated to material
questions. The most urgent expression of this displeasure has been the social
explosion of the Kabilia against the powers established that extends of
uninterrupted form from April of 2001, until the point of which all the region
runs the risk of disconnection of the rest of the country. However, so and as
it is come off the content of the Platform of the Kseur[
6 ] the vindications of the population
kabilia are first of all of socioeconomic nature, attacking the central
Government mainly by their incapacity to satisfy the most basic expectations
with the population. Therefore, it is not only the public life Algerian the one
that knows the emergency from February of 1992. Also the Algerian economy is in
emergency situation at least from October of 1988. Considering the demographic
situation of the country, is not more than a time question the one that the
Algerians begin "to vote with the feet" and at all costs try to
remake their lives in other places, in the emigration.
This continuity of the plagues that undergoes the Algerian population from
mid the Eighties and of the logic of structural adjustment in which the
economic measures applied by the successive governments for fifteen years have
been registering explains the relative shortage of specific analyses on the
recent Algerian economic policy, shortage that becomes nonexistence in the case
of the prospectivos studies almost (as if Algeria did not have future, but only
last).
The bibliography on the causes and the manifestations of the political,
economic crisis and social Algerian from 1988 is abundant and, in spite of the
appearances, it articulates with enough clarity a certain consensus, until the
point to be sometimes reiterativa. In fact, which varies is the used analytical
frame, the one another aspect or emphasis and sometimes metaphor which one
resorts to represent better the reality, and not as much the diagnosis bottom.
The extended interpretations more of the crisis articulate around the concepts
of rentista State[
7 ], of administered economy[
8 ], of "economy of the looting"[
9 ] or of "State to bunker"[
10 ]. At a more concrete level it is tried to
explain the concrete evolution of the Algerian economy based on factors like
the evolution of the prices of hydrocarbons, the economic interests and the
infiltration in the economic weave of the military, the appropriation of the
rents of hydrocarbons or the corruption or the violence. The official
interpretation, even recognizing many of the outstanding aspects by the
analysts (the rentistas corruption or behaviors)[
11 ], it tends to put the emphasis in the
desestructuración caused by the islamista violence, an economic approach that
completely ignores the social context and in that this one arose.
Nevertheless, in spite of this unquestionable continuity of the factors
that explain the Algerian reality the economic policy of these three last years
it presents/displays specific characteristics and of course it deserves an
analysis detailed in itself. The flexion point constituted it, at economic
level, the expiration of the program of structural adjustment imposed by the
International Monetary Fund (the IMF) to give its approval to the
reconstruction of the Algerian external debt (in May of 1998), and at political
level the election of the first civil president of Algeria from its
independence, Abdelaziz Bouteflika (the 15 of April of 1999). So, without
scorning the efforts of more long reach to explain the "Algerian
agony"[
12 ], the present work is centered in the
Algerian economic policy during the three last years, and tries to track the
perspective of economic political happiness for the next years.
2. The structural problems
The departure point has to be necessarily
the one of the structural restrictions that they frame and they limit - and
sometimes they orient of an evident way the economic policy and its results.
Doubt that does not fit the violence, under all its forms, continues being the
main economic problem of Algeria: not only under the form of the islamista
terrorism and the repression, but also as manifestation of the deep social
displeasure and, mainly, of the internal contradictions in which one is sunk
the Algerian society. Even though it can very well affirm that, in Algeria, the
political and social stability is other so many factors of production (very
little) in themselves, is elements that do not constitute the object of the
present study, because its solution exceeds the limits of the economic policy
and it only can come from a political action[
13 ].
Also difficult to confront, but directly incardinados in the matrix of the
economic policy, they are the structural problems that Algeria will have to
surpass to follow the way of the development, particularly the demographic
explosion, the necessity of use creation, the imperative to offer worthy
conditions of life to its population and the triple outer dependency (of the
hydrocarbon exports and the nourishing imports, but also of the international
credits whenever the fall of the prices of petroleum cuts the main source of
financing of the economy).
2. a) Demographic dynamics
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2. b) The material conditions of the life:
the water and the house
In spite of its enormous territorial extension, Algeria is an excessively
populated country, with a density of population in the coastal zones of more
than 250 inhabitants by km2. Far from being able to satisfy the
basic necessities with its population, Algeria must confront a chronic food and
water shortage. According to the data of United Nations, the annual water
availability is of 470.4 ms3 by person, adding all the uses (in 1996
the availabilities were of 527 ms3 by inhabitant)[
17 ]. In spite of it, esteem that between 35%
and 50% of the water consumed in the great cities of the country are lost as a
result of the flights of the system of canalization and the illegal
extractions. Consequently, a great part of the population must support
permanent restrictions of the water consumption, until the point of which the
water is becoming a permanent font of social instability in Algeria.
Another symptom of the shortage of the conditions of life in Algeria
constitutes the situation of the house. With more than 30 million inhabitants,
the country has a considered moving park in 4.100000 units of houses (what it
allows to quickly make the calculation of the average of people by unit of
houses of three atmospheres like average, approximately 7.3 people by house, as
opposed to 5.7 in Morocco or 4.9 in Egypt). The so large means of the homes are
of 6.58 people (with which there is near 350.000 homes without house). The CNES
(2001) has considered the deficit of houses in 1.600.000, whereas in 2001 66
were only given.000 social houses. As it contrasts, esteem that is almost a
million empty houses not used by its proprietors. Before the difficulties from
access to the house and the use, the average age of marriage does not stop to
be delayed (31.3 years for men and 27.6 for the women)[
18 ].
2. c) the outer dependencies
With a rate of nourishing dependency of the imports of 45%[
19 ], Algeria only can guarantee the feeding
of less than half of its present population. Of fact, the surface cultivated by
inhabitant (0.265 hectares) has diminished in a 50% with respect to the first
Seventies. It must to the fact that the population has tripled itself from
independence, but also to the occupation of an increasing proportion of the
most fertile earth caused by a uncontrolled urban development. According to
official estimations, only 18.5% of earth potentially agriculturists indeed are
cultivated. In the same way which the food supplying has become another great
preoccupation of public order, the nourishing invoice is a problem
(macro)económico structural of great spread in Algeria.
By the others, the oil monoculture is of such magnitude that are not
infrequent the analyses that use the international prices of petroleum (in
particular, of the Saharan Blend) like only explanatory factor of the Algerian
economy. It is not a exageración: more from 60% of the income of the State
(64.9% during the first semester of 2002, and 77% in 2001) they come from the
"fiscality of petroleum"[
20 ]. The hydrocarbons suppose more than one
third part of the Algerian GIP (41% in 2001) and constitute more of 97% of the
exports. Although such numbers vary from a year to another one based on the
evolution of the international prices of petroleum, the fact is that for more
than thirty years any advance significant has not been obtained to reduce this
dependency[
21 ].
3. the economic policy of the Bouteflika
governments (1999-2002)[ 22 ]
The year of
1999 marked clearly a point of flexion in the Algerian economic policy,
although still it is about to to see in what direction. After the years of
economic and social breakup and pricked fall in of the standard of life between
1988 and 1994, period 1994-1998 was marked by the painful recognition of the
lack of autonomy of the Algerian economy with respect to world-wide the
capitalist system and by the application of the program of structural
adjustment imposed by the IMF (in the set of this period, between 1986 and 1999
the GIP by inhabitant fell of 2.590 USS to 1.550 USS). After impasse of more or
less a year, the election of the new President in the elections of April of
1999 marked a new time of structural postadjustment that the Government would
wish that he was characterized by the normalization at political level and
"the reforms and the opening" at economic level. Which has been,
concretely, the economic strategy of the governments of Bouteflika?
3. a) The economic strategy: solution as opposed
to development
A significant characteristic of this
period is the almost total explicit programmatic document absence in which they
are exposed of systematic way, at least at rhetorical level, the aims and the average
ones to reach them of the Algerian economic policy, beyond the generic appeals
to the market economy, the liberalization and the commercial opening[
23 ]. Only the political declarations
desperdigadas by the Algerian leaders, the analysis of the facts and the
information of press allow to equip with content that strategy.
In spite of this ilegibilidad of the economic program of the present
government, the great options of economic policy seem to be the following ones:
- Good government: from the beginning of his mandate, President
Bouteflika has shown a public position extremely it jeopardize and frank against
the corruption and the fraud, and has promised to promote the transparency and
the effectiveness of the public administrations, beginning by the reform of the
judicial system and the structures of the State.
- Use of the resources public: in the three
programs of government approved by the Popular National Assembly from 1999, the
emphasis in the reestablishment of the financial and macroeconomic stability,
the viability of the balance of payments and the accumulation of international
reserves has been put. An express option as far as the sequence of the measures
of economic policy exists: in the first place the financial cleaning and the
structural reforms, and only later the satisfaction of the social necessities
and the recovery of the socioeconomic situation.
With regards to the economic policy itself, articulates around three great
axes:
- deprived público/sector Sector: the primary target in economic matter era
to continue with the "reforms of market" already initiated, fomenting
the paper of the sector deprived in the economy and creating favorable
surroundings for the investment. With the purpose of reinforcing this process,
the privatization of most of the public companies seted out: after the
liquidation or the sale to the workers or directors of near 1.000 companies
during the period the 1994-1998 and reduction of groups in the others (esteem
that the total volume of dismissals during those years ascended to near 450.000
people), in November of 2000 a list of 910 public companies (of the 1 announced.170
rest) that could be privatization object, declaring the intention to privatize
a hundred of them in the term of a year.
- Opening commercial: with the purpose of promoting the competition
and to attract the foreign investments, the reduction of the commercial
protection of the Algerian markets seted out, concretely by means of the
celebration in an Agreement of Euromediterráneo Association with the European
Union (with the creation in the mid term of a zone of free commerce) and of the
adhesion to the World-wide Organization of Commerce, because Algeria is one of
the few countries of the world that still does not belong to the same one.
- structural Regulation and reforms: the main instrument to put in practice the
economic strategy of the governments Bouteflika had to be the "structural
reforms". By means of this expression, reference to all a series of
reforms of the regulation and the structure of the administration of justice
(concretely reinforcing its independence and its agility and the qualifications
of the judges), of the education (ending the interventionism of the State in
the pedagogical directions and eradicating the religious fanaticism, reviewing
the scholastic cycles, the programs and text books, as well as legalizing near
600 deprived scholastic centers that exist in a legal emptiness and promoting
the formation of the educational ones) and of the public Administrations became
(administrative reform). In the economic scope, the reforms had to be
materialized in: a) the reconstruction and privatization of the public
companies, b) the reform of the financial sector - mainly by means of the
cleaning of the banks public -, c) the reform in depth of the system of customs
tariffs and d) the liberalization of the sector of hydrocarbons[
24 ], with other equally key complementary
measures, like the reform of the regime of property of agricultural earth or
industrial lands.
3. b) the economic results
Before entering to evaluate the concrete results of the Algerian economic
policy in these three years, it is precise to observe that the governments of
President Bouteflika have been with extremely favorable economic conditions.
The increase of the international prices of the petroleum registered from the
second semester of 1999 them has granted a considerable manoeuvre margin to
finance its plans of government. In terms of its own objectives of use of the
resources public and commercial opening, it is necessary to recognize that the
economic management of the Bouteflika governments has been certain successful.
No as much as soon as in the scopes of the good government, the structural
promotion of the private sector and reforms.
Indeed, the solution of the country has improved so much from the point of
view of its financial situation like from the one of the international
perception of the risk country. In a balance of its three first years of
mandate[
25 ], Bouteflika showed the following thing:
"[ we have obtained ] important an excess of the trade balance, the
control and the dominion of the inflation, the liberalization of the foreign
trade with the emergency of a dynamic private sector [ and ] the reconstruction
and the increase of the currency reserves". These profits can be
synthesized in graph 1.
Graph 1. Net outer indebtedness of Algeria
Source:
Elaboration of the author from data of the Algerian Ministry of Property
Thanks
fundamentally to the increase of the international prices of hydrocarbons
registered from end of 1999, Algeria has seen duplicate the value of its
exports and has been able to accumulate currency reserves of 22.500 million USS
(when in 1999 they got to fall to only 4.400 million USS, leaving to the
country on the brink of madness the bankruptcy). One is a good indicator, a
priori, of the outer viability of an economy, but also of a variable that
reflects the deserving position of a country with respect to the great
countries with strong currencies. Simultaneously, the external debt has been
reduced in a third: of a maximum of 33.700 million USS in 1996 have happened to
22.000 million USS at the end of 2002. These numbers reveal that the financial
position net outside of Algeria is, at the end of 2002, slightly positive one,
that is to say, that Algeria has become creditor of the rest of the world
Another thing is that is difficult to include/understand the underlying
economic logic in this financial balance net positive of the country as opposed
to the rest of the world (with an accumulation of reserves international
equivalent to twenty months of imports, four times more than the volume of
reserves that it has, for example, Morocco), like excessive the budgetary one
that registers the State from 1999, in a developed country less with the social
deficiencies which they undergo the Algerians, not to mention the excess of the
balance by current account of more of 8% of the GIP[
26 ]. In any case, this comfortable financial
position is sustained in an excellent evolution of the macroeconomic variables:
the inflation has become stabilized around a very moderate level (0.3 % in 2000
instead of 5.7% in 1997, no matter how hard later it has returned to begin to
appear like consequence, partly, of the depreciation of Algerian dinar, with a
4.2% in 2001 and one forecast of 3.2% for 2002) and the budgetary balance has
happened of a deficit (-3,5% of the GIP in 1998 and -0,5% of the GIP in 1999)
to an excess of 9.9% of the GIP in 2000 and 3.4% in 2001.
But to make a balance complete of the economic policy of the Bouteflika
governments this excellent macroeconomic health must oppose with its effects on
the conditions of life and the economic perspective of the population, as well
as on the national development. In this respect, the balance is much more
shady: in growth terms, for example, the Bouteflika governments have shown an
endemic incapacity to transform the enormous oil rent into wealth and the
wealth in well-being. In fact, the growth of the GIP has not let decelerate from
1998 (it see graph 2), whereas the income by hydrocarbon exports surpassed all
the historical records[
27 ]. In any case, they have not let increase
from 1998[
28 ], while the rate of economic growth,
although has stayed in positive values, has shown a maintained tendency to
diminish.
Source: Elaboration of the author from data of the IMF
In addition, these rates of economic growth come near more and more to the
rate of growth of the population (1.82% in 2000), that is to say, as soon as
they have contributed to the growth of the GIP by inhabitant (who, according to
the World Bank, has happened of 1.550 USS in 1999 to 1.630 USS in 2001)[
29 ]. It is certain that, from 1995,
something in terms of rent by inhabitant (+1.5% annual has recovered, instead
of -1,7% annual one between 1990 and 1995), but the distribution of this rent
seems to have gotten worse: due to the loss of spending power of the wages and
to the increase of unemployment, the consumption by inhabitant has diminished
in an annual 0.4% between 1990 and 2000[
30 ]. Even the guaranteed national minimum
wage (SNMG), perceived by 13% of the wage-earners, is lost incessantly buying
capacity (in spite of the last revision of the minimum wage in a 33%, that goes
back to January of 2001, when it was fixed to 8.000 dinares monthly, around 100
€). The average wage in the industry, whose workers objectively are
privileged in the present Algerian society, ascends to 23.620 dinares monthly
(around 300 USS).
With regards to
the rate of unemployment, although own President Bouteflika recognizes that it
would be necessary to reach rates of economic growth of 7% or annual 8% in the
ten next years to avoid that unemployment continues increasing[
31 ], the official forecasts do not
anticipate such rates of growth. In the budget approved for exercise 2003, the
considered rate of growth is of 4% (on the other hand, the IMF anticipates, in
his World-wide Economic Perspective of September of 2002, a rate of growth
of 2.9% for 2003). Thus and everything, the increase of the expenses of the
State in 2003 will not happen of 4,2%.
From the point of view of the population and the territory, the difficult
conditions of life and the desinvolucración of the State in a number every
greater time of scopes they are concrete. The tendency marks with all clearness
the poverty statistics to it, that show an increasing pauperización of ample
segments of the population: esteem that 23% of the population (that is to say,
7 million people) are below the absolute threshold of poverty (less than 1
daily USS of income), whereas more of 40% (altogether, 14 million people) they
have less than 2 USS of income to the day.
The own IMF, in spite of being extremely satisfied with the global evolution
with the Algerian economy from 1994, recognizes that "the social and
political situation has been deteriorated recently"[
32 ]. In its alternative report to the report
presented/displayed by Algeria before the Committee of Nations United on the
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in November of 2001, the Federation the
International of Leagues of Human rights goes further on, as it shows his own
title already: "Algeria. Violation of the economic, social and cultural
rights: a precarizada population ".
A synthetic indicator of this rate of negative transformation of wealth in
well-being of the population constitutes the difference between since Algeria
in the world-wide classification of the GIP by inhabitant (put 84) and the
Index of Human Development calculated by the PNUD occupies (put 106), that is
to say, a value of negative transformation of -22.[
33 ]
But beyond the economic indicators, either from the point of view of the
regulation of the economic activity it cannot by less than to be stated an
evident stagnation, not to mention blockade: "from 1999, the effective
application of the structural reforms has stagnated in most of the scopes, in
spite of the important preparatory works that they are in course"[
34 ]. This has not prevented, nevertheless,
that the international perception of Algeria has improved years in the last.
The Index of Economic Freedom (Index of Economic Freedom) of the Heritage North
American Foundation, by example, has registered a slight improvement, happening
of a score of 3.45 in 1998 to 3.25 in 2002 over a scale of 1 (for the free
economies) to 5 (for the repressed economies), if well with a certain backward
movement with respect to 2001 (3,10)[
35 ] that possibly it reflects a certain
deception of the international markets with respect to the advance of the
reforms in Algeria. But the perspective does not have to be lost: the category
which it continues belonging Algeria in this classification is the one of
country mostly unfree (with very little freedom).
In any case, the impulse reformer of the Bouteflika governments must be
described at least as erratic. The vicissitudes of the successive plans of
privatization are a good example of it. The rate, the content and the
privatization modalities even seem to change based on the political ups and
downs and of the international pressures. Whereas the Minister of the
Participation and the Coordination of the Reforms, Abdelhamid Temmar, declared
in January of 2002 the intention of the Government to come, in a brief term, to
the privatization of 184 "desestructuradas" public companies, at the
beginning of November the same Minister (now reconverted Minister of the
Participation and the Promotion of the Investment) gave to understand that, in
fact, 400 of the 1.170 state societies were in an expansion and yield
situation, and that around 200 "was only desestructuradas", of that
70 companies would be privatized (to declare before the National Assembly, few
weeks later, which in a term of two years 320 public companies would be
privatized, in "packages" of 40, on a total of 700 companies
including in a new program of privatization). The reality is that, to December
of 2002, in these three years only there is an important public company that
indeed has been partially privatized (the iron and steel company Sider,
including the great industrial complex of Annaba and its harbor facilities, in
which Indian group ISPAT has acquired a participation of 70%)[
36 ]. The political confusion on this subject
cannot be greater.
A very significant case is the one of the banking
sector. The six banks public continue concentrating more of 90% of the banking
assets (although there are other 25 private banks, among them 6 foreigners that
operate in Algeria). One is a key file, since the banks public constitute the
main source of financing of the public companies, and many of them could see
the condemned the bankruptcy without this financial support. During last the
three years, public has come itself to a recapitalización of the banks that it has
supposed the injection of approximately 1.200 million USS within the framework
of a great operation of previous cleaning to their possible privatization (at
the end of 2001, the non-recoverable credits of these banks ascended to more
than 4.500 million USS, of them 600 million solely with the companies of the
public sector), but the privatization plans seem to be postponed
so far[ 37 ].
With regards to the deprived sector, it is necessary to necessarily
relativize the expansion of which usually it is spoken: its weight continues
very being limited in the set of the Algerian economy[
38 ] and in any case far below to the one of
the remaining countries of the Maghreb; secondly, a very important part of its
volume of businesses corresponds in fact to a handful of deprived enterprise
groups that prosper in the borders of the power in a gray zone and in
conditions that hardly can be described as free competition.
A good indicator of the slowness with which it advances the modernization
of the Algerian economic weave is the one of the little development of the
telephone communications and the connections to Internet, that in the developed
countries less are often sectors handle for other activities,
specifically in the private sector[
39 ]. Even after the approval of the new Law
of post office and telecommunications of August of 2000 and of the concession
of the second license of movable telephony GSM in 2001 July (obtained by the
Egyptian group Orascom by 737 million USS), the total number of lines of
movable telephony does not happen of 250.000, whereas in Morocco, with a
population similar to the one of Algeria, the line number of movable telephony
are already of 4.7 million[
40 ]. In fact, Algeria is the country of
Oriente.medio and North Africa with a smaller density of fixed telephone lines[
41 ] and of connections to Internet (whose
number calculates in less than 20.000)[
42 ].
With regards to the three great reforms announced by the President at the moment
of their investiture (justice, the education and the administrative reform),
and after one first stage of elaboration of information of experts, all of them
follow the delay of decisions and concrete actions. The great reforms frame of
the economic activity, like the reform of the regulation of the sector of
hydrocarbons (one of the heavy weights of the Buteflika governments, the
Minister of Energy Chakib
Khelil it announced or in
March of 2001 a new first draft of Law that has caused a great social opposition
and until now not even has been discussed in the Government, and the less still
presented/displayed to the ANP, finally being congealed by decision of the
President of the Republic in December of 2002) or the reform of the regime of
property of the agricultural earth, whose examination by the Government was
postponed once again in November of 2002, it seems very difficult that they can
culminate before the electoral appointment of the presidential ones of April of
2004[
43 ].
Finally, with regards to the commercial opening it can say that it is the
scope in which the Bouteflika governments have been more consequent between
their objectives and their profits: in April of the 2002, Government he signed
the Agreement of Association with the European Union, and the negotiations of
adhesion to the OMC or are directed, anticipating itself that they conclude at
the end of 2003 or principles of 2004, although the successive governments have
shown a certain disinterestedness to construct the necessary social consensus
around a process of as much strategic importance (it see section 5.b).
In conclusion - and in reference to an effective debate in Europe in the
last years -, whereas the Bouteflika governments considerably seem to have
advanced in the nominal convergence of the Algerian economy, can say that they
have even backed down with regards to the real convergence. As far as the
structural reforms, these governments seem to have exhausted these three years
in a propedéutica mission that, so far, as soon as he lets himself feel in the
economic reality and social Algerian. But we now happen to summarily analyze
the only element of its economic strategy in which these governments have
passed indeed of the plans or commitments for the future to the concrete acts.
3. c) the Plan of Support to Economic Relaunching
2001-2004
In April of 2001, the Government announced a plan of relaunching of the
economic activity (Plan of Support to the Economic Relaunching) by a period of
four years (2001-2004, that is to say, until the end of the presidential
mandate of Bouteflika). This plan was equipped with 525.000 million of dinares
(that is to say, almost 7.000 million USS, near 13% of the GIP of 2000
throughout three years; it see the table 2). His declared objectives were
"to absorb unemployment" and the "relaunching of the basic
activities of the State": one treated, therefore, of a classic plan of
stimulation of the demand by means of infrastructure investments and the
support to the agricultural development, the PYMES and the development of the
human resources. plan also contains some measures of reduction of the tax
burden for the foreign investors and the companies.
Passed the equator of the plan (in fact, in the plan it is anticipated to
both concentrate three fourth parts of the expenses in first years), the
evaluation of its impact cannot be too complaciente. In spite of the
triunfalistas declarations of the Secretary of State in charge of the Economic
Relaunching (that speaks of 370.000 created empleaos, 75% of permanent them,
with the participation of 11.000 private companies), the plan has only had
insignificant effects on the rate of growth (initially, the Government
maintained that the plan could contribute to reach a rate of growth of to 5% or
6% of the GIP), and those presumed uses have not been reflected in the
statistics of quotations to the social security, that follow suspended. This
can be explained partly by the reach limited of the plan (less than one third
part of the hydrocarbon exports of a single year distributed throughout four
years and a little more than half of the annual increase of the income by
exports registered for three years) and by the narrow imbricación of the
networks of the informal sector in the Algerian economy all the levels (it see
graph 3), but provokes inevitable questions on the quality of the public cost
in Algeria. In fact, according to the evaluations of the CNES, that
nevertheless the plan in its previous report had maintained initially (first
semester of 2001), the concrete application of this plan "it often has
conventional forms with ordinary operations, without no strategic depth”[ 44 ].
Approved in July of 2001, but enrolled one in the same logic, the National
Plan of Desarrollo Agri'cola (PNDA) seems to have had something more of
success, at least in terms of growth of agricultural production (18.7% between
2000 and 2001[
45 ]). The PNDA bets basically by the
financing of the agricultural investments for the intensification of the
operations, by means of the adoption of techniques of irrigated land or
cultures under plastic or the promotion of more intensive cultures. The reform
of the regime of real estate property of agricultural earth, apparently
postponed at the present time, had to complement to this plan of agricultural
relaunching.
4. the social base of the reforms and
the definition of the national interest
In front of a so ambitious program of reforms, on
the paper, like the undertaken one by the Bouteflika governments, it is
necessary to ask itself inevitably which are the social forces that support the
reforms. Making abstraction of the external forces to the country, the first
surprising establishment in the case of Algeria is the fact that the economic
reforms do not count on the support decided of any of the great organized
social groups. Beyond some authentic reformers of good faith in the own
Algerian Government, the main force of the reform seems to be the conscience of
the circles of the power on which its maintenance in the Government depends on
the international support, that depends as well to a great extent on the
implantation of the market reforms, that run into in fact with a strong
internal opposition. The lack of consensus on the main axes of these reforms is
almost total in the Algerian society: neither the workers, nor the industralists,
nor the civil employees, nor the mass media nor the population in general, not
even the political parties like such, seem to identify themselves with the
economic objectives imposed by the Bouteflika governments, but who, on the
contrary, proliferate the critics and the mobilizations with the purpose of
blocking the concrete initiatives of beginning of the reforms. In fact, it can
say that, in the present Algerian society, not even there is a true consensus
on the market economy like so. This is something that can be explained as much
by the rentistas habits acquired by a great part of the Algerian economic
agents during the three last decades like by the own lack of credibility of the
project of economic transformation of the Government. This sample with all
clarity the necessity to undertake a radical transformation of all the
structures of economic incentives in terms of taxes, wages, subventions, access
on the credit and prices to culminate the transition towards a market economy
like previous requirement for the success of the economic reforms in course.
In this
context, the absence of political and social debate calls the attention on the
economic policy between the economic agents, the political parties and the
Government[ 46 ]. In consequence, does not exist any established
mechanism to define by aggregation the national interests, which contributes to
the opacity of the processes of definition of objectives, determination of
priorities and formulation of policies, feeding, as well, the desafección of
the population towards the political institutions. The Economic and Social
National Council from 1998 and Forum DES Chefs d'Entreprise[ 47 ] from for two years they have been trying to promote the
public debate on the economic policy with remarkable internal mediatic impact
and international echo, but without a real incidence on the process of decision
making. As far as the political parties, they do not play the role of
intermediation and vertebración of interests that assume that it corresponds to
them in a democracy. The political system does not work like instance of
aggregation of preferences and definition of the collective priorities, but as
scene of the fight to take control of the management of the oil rent and screen
of groups of interests located to the margin of the market and the democratic
game. Consequently, before lack of instances and of practices of agreement
between representatives political and agents economic and, therefore,
nonexistence of agreements and commitments which they must be respected among
them (who orient and determine the action of the Government), a "phase
angle between the generosity of the declarations of intentions exists and the
do-nothing policy in the daily practices" and "this phase angle is
deeper right related to the nonexistence of any serious economic projection for
the economic and social development of the country"[ 48 ]. By as much, the reconstruction of these instances of
discussion, negotiation and arbitration between the diverse interests in game
is a key element to guarantee an effectiveness in the formulation and defense
of the national interests and, at instrumental level, of the Algerian economic
policy, which takes to the inevitable interaction between the economic reforms
and the political reforms to us.
Therefore,
the Government does not play the role of intermediation between the diverse
interests and groups of pressure that corresponds to him, conjugating the
traditional lines of social fracture (workers and
sindicatos/emprearios/agricultores; industralists of exportación/empresarios of
import) in an integrating and movilizador political project, but that
superposes to these lines of fracture structures of being able opaque, in the
measurement in which the economic policy does not respond apparently to the
interests of the organized groups of pressure like such, but that noun is
defined without no political debate. In these conditions, it is difficult to elude an interpretation
of the Algerian economic policy in key of strategy of maintenance of the power
or political cycle. Although during these three years the Bouteflika governments
have not adopted active measures to improve the luck of the population, have
carefully postponed all the reforms that could have negative effects for statu
quo socioeconomic, like for example the privatizations. The concrete
measures that yes have been applied will not much more produce their effects
but there of the temporary horizon of this presidency, and in the case in the
Agreement of Association with the European Union even after possible a second
mandate (2004-2009) of President Bouteflika.
In this
context, another question of great spread is the one of the quality of the
economic information. Paradoxicalally in an economy that continues strongly
being planned, is an almost total lack of studies and detailed prospectivos
analyses on the probable effects of the great economic options of the
Government, for example credible studies of impact of the commercial opening by
industrial sectors, economic projections and even exhaustive balance of the
socioeconomic situation. In fact, often it is had not even trustworthy economic
statistics of base, or exist fragant contradictions between the statistics
available. In its information, the IMF talks about this lack of quality of the
national economic information system indicating that "to the bad quality of
the data [...] at the moment prevents the pursuit of the economic situation and
the formulation of economic policies "[ 49 ]. It stops the companies, this means that they do not
have some data nails for his projections and calculations, concretely on the
size of the market, the income of the families, the evolution of the economic
surroundings, etc. At the same time, this justifies the doubts expressed by the
main economic agents on the existence of a true national economic strategy[ 50 ]. In these circumstances, any analysis of the Algerian
economy has to be, by definition, merely approximate.
All it
causes that the Algerian economic policy is not object of appropriation by the
economic agents, which seems to have ended the traditional function of
legitimation of the power that has carried out the economic policy in Algeria
from independence[ 51 ].
5.
Some key questions for the future:
towards an economic solution of the
crisis?
In the present conditions, and from the economic Algeria, point of view it
needs a true national plan of economic rescue around a articulated affluent
project modernization with a program reforms that contributes clear visions on
the great national economic problems:
- an improvement of the economic perspective stops most of the population;
this implies a strategy of use creation and a strategy to confront the
institutional distortions that prevent an improvement of the conditions of
life, particularly the water and house shortage;
- the international insertion, which estimates to give an answer to the
questions raised by the opening of the national markets to the international
competition (in terms of intensity and sequence of this opening), the paper
that must carry out and the incentives that must offer to the foreign
investment and the optimization of the operation of the hydrocarbon resources
(with the objective to maximize the transformation of the rent of hydrocarbons
in national wealth, which among other things raises a series of questions of
intergenerational fairness);
- the reform of the institutional frame of the country, concretely by means
of the fight against the corruption, the increase of the effectiveness of the
State, the reform of the education and justice; all it will be extremely
difficult without a simultaneous process of real democratization of the
country.
After the definition of the objectives and the strategy, it will be
essential to articulate the necessary social consensus around them (surpassing
the castling of the created interests) and to mobilize all the resources
available to reach them: in concrete the rent of hydrocarbons, but also the
private initiative and international the financial markets. A country with so
important social deficits and of development that it resigns to exhaust his
capacity of indebtedness in the international markets, since has been coming
making Algeria for three years, reveals the existence of serious distortions at
level of the collective mechanisms of decision making[
52 ].
Really, it does not have to forget that the economic and social dynamics
that took to the catastrophe of the Civil War that has been undergoing Algeria
for more than ten years was triggered by the revolts of October of 1988, whose
main cause was the deterioration of the material conditions of life of ample
segments of the Algerian population. At moments at which the terrorist threat
seems to mitigate itself, the risk is run of ending the Civil War without to
have solved the deep causes that caused it. Therefore, any policy of social
pacification (without which there will be no national concord) will have to be
based on an appreciable improvement of the future economic perspective and the
present conditions of life of a majority of the population.
5. a) The question of the use
By the others, this improvement of the conditions
of life will not be able to be made reality without the creation of million
uses in next the ten years to put remedy to rampante unemployment (were two
million of unemployed in 1997, as opposed to three present million) and the new
incorporation of cohortes of Algerian young people who will arrive at the
market of work in the next years (to absorb them, will be necessary to create
300 at least.000 annual uses; it see section 2.a). This means to obtain nothing
less than an increase of the population occupied of more of 50% in the ten next
years, "a profit that have not obtained not even the economies of high
performance of the Southeast of Asia at the moments of maximum growth of the
use"[
53 ].
However, between 1989 and 1997 the rate of growth of the use was of 3.2%,
clearly below the rate of growth of the active populace (4%)[
54 ]. According to Eurostat (2002, p. 2), in
2001 the rate of growth of the use in Algeria was of 1%, of all insufficient
point to absorb the rate of growth of the active populace, that surpasses 3,5%.
This lack of use creation must, partly, to the low intensity of manual labor
the Algerian production[
55 ], but mainly to the lack of economic
growth: whereas between 1990 and 1999 the average rate of growth was of the
1.5%, a rate of 5.5% to absorb the growth of the active populace had been
necessary. But this considerable increase of the rate of growth only can be
reached by means of substantial increases of the investment[
56 ]. In Algeria, the direct or indirect
source of accumulation of these investments of capital short term cannot be
other that the foreign rents of hydrocarbons or investments.
In these conditions, any economic policy that it tries to confront the true
problems of the country and, therefore, for creating the bases for a minimum of
social stability, will have to be oriented towards the intensive creation of
use and, therefore, towards the promotion of the intensive activities of manual
labor like the public construction, agriculture (which they also impel the
internal demand) and works. For it, the investments would have to be evaluated
and the expenses public considering the prices shade (that is to say, the
indirect social benefits of the creative activities of use). It is inaudito
that in a country with similar rate of unemployment resorts to the work of
6.000 Chinese workers (contracted by a winning Chinese company of a public
licitation) for the construction of public houses in Algiers.
Judging by official documents, the Algerian authorities are perfectly
conscious of this priority and the remedies that prevail, but do not seem to
have the required feeling of urgency to mobilize and to concentrate all the
national resources in the attainment of so objective. The delay or the nonexistence
of clear a general conception of the reform of the structures and the contents
of the system of national education is extremely significant in this respect:
the educative policy, and very specially primary and secondary education,
victims of an explosive mixture of negligence and eagerness of manipulation for
several decades, has been having a fundamental importance in a country in which
more of 40% of the population it is in scholastic age, because it conditions
the future.
5. b) the question of the opening
Algeria continues being one of the most protectionistic countries of the
world, with tariffs whose nominal rate average is of 21,3%[
57 ] and with one it appraises weighed
(income arancelarios/valor of the exports) of 16%. However, from 1999 Algeria
it has acquired an express commitment of commercial opening, a
"irreversible option" according to own President Bouteflika. This
option has been translated, in particular, in one it reforms in depth of the
system of tariff protection[
58 ], in the celebration in an Agreement of
Association with the European Union that entails the creation of a zone of free
commerce in a term of 12 years and the negotiations in course for the adhesion
from Algeria to the OMC.
However, this option seems to have taken without sufficiently considering
its probable impact on the Algerian economic activity. The opening process does
not have assured its sustentabilidad in a country in which the only sector
export is the one of the hydrocarbons (97% of the total value of the exports)
and that suffer from a considerable rigidity in the composition of their
imports. For seven years, the imports have been staying at a stable level next
to the 10.000 million USS, of them approximately 3.000 pharmaceutical million
USS for nourishing imports and products, 3.500 million for equipment goods,
2.000 million for half-finished goods and 1.500 million for consumer goods.
These two last games are most sensible to the opening, mainly so that
indications that exist the demand of imports in these sectors been strongly has
repressed from the first Nineties[
59 ].
If in the Seventies and the eighty Algerian
Government it tried to surpass the dependency of hydrocarbons by means of the
development of heavy industries, now the motto is the one of the opening and
the liberalization of the economy, but nothing does not ensure either in this
occasion the success. An important difference is based, in any case, in which
at that time there was an ample social consensus on the industrial policy and
the general strategy of development, and even the program of structural
adjustment prevailed in the Eighties and first ninety without excessive social
opposition. However, at the moment as much the unions as the industralists
fight with all their average ones against the great initiatives of opening
undertaken by the Government.
1) the Agreement of Association with the UE
In
December of 2001, the Algerian Government and the European Commission reached
an agreement on the text in the new Agreement of UE-Algeria Association, later
sealed in Valencia (Spain) in April of 2002. He is interesting to observe that,
in spite of the difficulties to reach an agreement - Algeria has been the last
country of the Maghreb in within the framework signing an Agreement of
Association of the Euromediterránea Association, behind Tunisia in 1996 and
Morocco in 1998 -, finally the Agreement not difference too much in the
agreements subscribed with the other countries, safe in the measurement in
which it specifically mentions the sector of hydrocarbons. Nevertheless, in
fact the hydrocarbon commerce is regulated by bilateral mercantile contracts of
State in the long term, and it will not be affected by the Agreement of
Association.
From the economic point of view estrictametne, is
difficult to understand why reasons the Algerian Gobieno was arranged to sign
an agreement like that one. In the case of a country whose exports are
concentrated exclusively in the sector of hydrocarbons, it actually supposes to
grant unilateral concessions. In effect, with regards to the bottoms of
cooperation provided by the UE, the European Commission did not hope the
company/signature in the Agreement to write up a document of strategy
2002-2006, to elaborate a national indicative program 2002-2004 (equipped with
150 million of €) and to start up the selected proyecos: 60 million of €
for a program of support to the PYMES and 38 million of € for another
program of support to the privatization and the industrial reconstruction. In
any case, its volume is quite insignificant in a country whose income by
hydrocarbon exports - and, therefore, the income dle Been have increased in
near 10.000 million USS to the year for three years.
Thus, it is
no wonder the Algerian Government has received critics of the social
interlocutors in the sense that "he has badly negotiated his insertion in
the world-wide economy". With it, makes reference to the unilateral
reduction of the customs tariffs approved by the Government in the month of
August of 2001, and that took effect the 1 of January of 2002 (it see note 58),
indeed when Algeria in the heat of was final effort of negotiation in the
Agreement of Association. And those will be these tariffs lower than they will
serve as base for the program of tariff dismantling anticipated by the
Agreement. In any case, it does not seem that for the Algerian Government the
reach of the acquired economic commitments was determining once the Agreement
of Association between in vigor: time plays its favor. According to the
experience in other Agreements of Association, the ratification in the
Agreement of Association on the part of the Parliaments of the States members
of the UE[ 60 ] they will be necessary like minimum two or three years
(that is to say, until 2005-2006, supposing that it is not blocked in some of
these countries), so that between in vigor. In addition, the creation of the
zone of free commerce anticipated in the Agreement contemplates a period of
transition of twelve years, so that as of the sixth year (not before 2012) the
tariff dismantling will solely affect the most important sectors of the
national production. On the other hand, the Algerian Government rejected the
supply of the European Commission to immediately apply a provisional agreement
on the commercial dispositions in the Agreement of Association[ 61 ].
Perhaps
however, it is necessary to consider that the new Agreement, that comes to
replace the Agreement of Cooperation of 1976 (effective, therefore, for more
than 25 years), will constitute the legal and institutional frame of the
relations between the European Union and Algeria during the next years and even
decades. This Agreement defines of irreversible way a frame of insertion of the
Algerian economy in the world-wide economy. In that measurement, the Agreement
of Association represents probably the main strategic economic decision in the
long term made by the Bouteflika governments. In spite of it, the Agreement of
Association has been signed of completely unilateral form by the Algerian
Government, without no form of consultation or joint of a social consensus. As
opposed to this lack of "socialization" of the challenges that raises
for the future, it is difficult to imagine that the population is arranged to
support the sacrifices that will impose in the mid term.
The main one
of those challenges constitutes the creation of a zone of free commerce, with
the elimination of the Algerian customs tariffs on original industrial products
of the European Union[ 62 ]. The Agreement at the most anticipates - in its article 6 the creation of a
"zone of free commerce throughout a period of transition of twelve
years", although "as of the date of take effect" in the Agreement,
that is to say, as of 2004-2006. The industrial products are classified in
three categories: including in first of them (Annexed 2 in the Agreement) they
must be liberalized from the moment of the take effect in the Agreement.
The rights
of customs of products including in Annexed the 3 will have to be eliminated
progressively (80-70-60-40-20-0%) in a term of six years (until 2010-2012),
whereas the rest of products enjoys one more a prolonged protection, than will
be dismantled throughout a period of twelve years
(90-80-70-60-50-40-30-20-10-5-0%), that is to say, towards 2016-2018. In
addition, provisional the additional right that is perceived at the moment for
48 products (48% ad valorem) it will have to be eliminated in four years from the 1
of January of 2002, with a reduction of 12 percentage points every year;
therefore, in fact they will be solely these products (tractors, trucks,
equipment for public works) those that will support immediately the effects of
the zone of free commerce. As far as agricultural products, the Agreement
already confirms the granted preferences to Algeria by the European Union, and
mentions (in article 13) the restoration of "a greater liberalization of
its reciprocal agricultural product interchanges" that will have to
negotiate in a term of five years.
With regards to the foreseeable impact in the Agreement, any concrete
measurement[
63 ] one faces great difficulties. The
methods and habitual quantitative techniques to measure the impact of a process
of commercial opening very have a limited utility in the Algerian case. In
order to begin, which assumes that they measure the impact in a market economy,
exactly does not define the prevailing situation in Algeria. In effect, the
practical totality of the exports and one leaves from the imports (that it can
arrive at 50%, among them a great part of the imports of nourishing product and
equipment goods very important as the cereals) take place under a regime that
very or can be described as commerce of State - or administered economy -,
which means that they will not be affected by the liberalization of the market
interchanges, and that through them the Government will be able to
administer with greater facility its impacts by means of the management of
international contracts of purchase. that it is more, in a country in which the
exports makes almost exclusively the State (through the public hydrocarbon
company, Sonatrach), the distribution or the regime of access to currencies
plays a fundamental role for the materialization of the effects of the zone of
free commerce through an increase of the imports. However, in Algeria, in spite
of the formal liberalization of the currency market from January of 1996 and
the convertibility of dinar, actually the central bank is the Banque d'Algérie
- that directly receives all currencies coming from the hydrocarbon exports the
one that the supply of currencies in the weekly currency auctions monopolizes
between the commercial banks and, through them, the type of change (another
variable fundamental to measure the impact of the commercial opening).
But the tariff dismantling will be let also feel on the income of the
State, since at the moment near 10% of its total income (that is to say,
approximately 1.500 million USS to the year or 25% of the budgetary income
coming from hydrocarbons) are not customs income, and a great part of these
income will disappear gradually with the creation of the zone of free commerce
(the imports coming from the European Union constitute two third parts of the
Algerian total imports). It stops to compensate the loss of these income with
an increase of the fiscal income, will be necessary approximately to increase
the fiscal pressure in a 25% on the present levels, which hardly will be
accepted by the population and the Algerian companies and, mainly, the risk
runs of affecting to the degree of social support the Agreement of Association
and, more in general, to the commercial opening and the reforms.
Said this, it is necessary to mainly interrogate on the
sustentabilidad in the agreement, had account of which the effective
application of the zone of free commerce will create new tensions on the
Algerian economy:
- from the macroeconomic point of view, the liberalization of the
interchanges and the structural dependency of the world-wide prices of
hydrocarbons and the imports of nutritional products and goods of equipment
surely they will give rise to a strangling of the outer sector, a currency
shortage that could force to reintroducir the change controls and would put the
convertibility of dinar at issue, one of the fundamental conditions for the
operation of the own creation of the zone of free commerce; in any case, it is
essential to make detailed studies more on its impact;
- at political level, the negative effects in use terms and the
prolongation of the logic of structural adjustment that follows the Algerian
economic policy from beginnings of the Eighties can turn to the creation of the
zone of free commerce an additional factor of destabilization, with the risk of
deslegitimar not only to the Algerian class leader, but also to the European
Union and the own capitalist system like so.
2) the multilateral opening
According to the announcements conducted by the Algerian Government, the
adhesion to the OMC is predicted for end of 2003, before the new round of
multilateral commercial negotiations of Doha begins. Against which usually one
affirms in the Algerian press, this adhesion is not bound necessarily to a
greater degree of commercial opening, but that entails solely a
"consolidation" of the present levels of protection, that is to say,
the assumption of a commitment signs and irrevocable of not increasing the
protection in the future and turning all the commercial barriers tariffs to
increase the transparency of the protection mechanisms. Therefore, the adhesion
to the OMC mainly involves a modernization of the Algerian commercial
legislation, and as so it does not have alternative: it reflects a commitment
of property to the international community as it is formed at the moment, and
not necessarily a concrete option of economic policy. Even so, it has provoked
a strong opposition between unions and industralists, whom the frustration
caused by the celebration in the Agreement of Association possibly reflects
rather, that yes represents a certain and immediate risk much more for its
direct interests. The negotiations of adhesion to the OMC run the risk of
becoming I inform expiatorio in an Agreement with the European Union whose
negotiation has not managed all the good that had and that has been celebrated
hastily without no public debate on its consequences.
5. c) the incognito of the
foreign investment
From year 2001, the treatment that occurs to the foreign investments has
assimilated legally to the treatment that occurs to the national investments.
But this equality of treatment does not hide the persistence of numerous
administrative and/or bureaucratic and even legal obstacles to the activity of
the foreign companies in Algeria (a good example can be the regulation in the
matter of dismissal or of participation of the workers in the control elements
of the inherited company of the socialist period, that often are not respected
actually in the deprived companies, but that in spite of it create legal
uncertainty). To it to the slowness and the lack of independence of the
judicial system come to add themselves. This causes that no foreign investor
dares to settle in the Algerian market without making sure previously at least
a certain degree connivencia of the authorities.
Until the moment, and from 1993, when the foreign investments liberalized
for the first time[
64 ], the investment extracted has been
limited almost exclusively "the extractive" activities, among them
evidently mainly the oil sector (that in the last absorbs the practical
totality of the foreign investments ten years), but also the contracts public
and the concessions of services noncomercializables public like the licenses of
telecommunications, the contracts work public...[
65 ] But until Algeria it has not been able
now to attract the attention of the productive investments[
66 ].
It is difficult to visualize how it could change
this situation: it is certain that the agency international of insurance of
credit to the export and qualification of risks has indicated to a positive
evolution of the risks for the foreign investors in Algeria in the last years.
But it is not it less than the foreign investors follow put under innumerable
bureaucratic slownesses (when nonpractical of corruption) and and often
generally very inefficient arbitrary administrative practices. What is worse,
the perception of the social and political risk of the country continues being
enormous at moments at which the relative position of the Maghreb has been
deteriorated as a result of the irruption in the international markets of the
countries of the East of Europe, and in which the permanent reiteration of
reform plans which finally they do not get to be applied and persistent the
social instability create a considerable insecurity for the investing
potentials.
5. e) the diversification
of the exports and the promotion of the PYMES
In the three last years, Algeria has continued its
process of desindustrialización. industrial production of the public companies
has fallen in a 25% in the last ten years, and most of public the industrial
companies is in state of technical bankruptcy, with rates of use of their
capacity of theoretical production below 40%. Paradoxicalally, the public
industries that undergo a clearer backward movement are intensive industries in
manual labor like the textile industry or the leather or the agro-alimentary
industry, in which in principle Algeria must have a comparative advantage; in
fact, it is in those same sectors in which the private companies are
experiencing a great expansion. Symmetrically, they are the heavy industries
(metalmecánica or the iron and steel industry), a priori less competitive,
those than they are being able to increase its production.
However, the revitalización of the national industry - as much public as
prevailed she is the unique one via surpassing its structural dependency of
hydrocarbons. In Algeria, agriculture hardly will become - and in any case
marginally a sector of export, which had by a side to the situation of the
international markets and, on the other hand, to the deficits of Algerian
nourishing production and to the perspective of demographic evolution. Algerian
agriculture undergoes serious limitations as a result of the water shortage and
the variability of the pluviometría, the little proportion of cultivables
territories (not more than 8.4 million hectares, 3.4% of the national
territory) and more even of territories of irrigated land (only 7% of the
useful agricultural surface, being these unique territories of irrigated land
the able ones to maintain the intensive productions characteristic of the
potential sectors of export) and the carelessness in which been it has sunk
during decades from independence. To all it they come to add little
mechanization and the legal uncertainty on the property of agricultural earth
in as much does not undertake a reform of the regime of property of these earth[
67 ] that it contributes clarity in this
respect. In fact, the agricultural sector does not contribute more of 10% of
the Algerian GIP (although it continues supposing near 25% of the national
use). And it is not necessary to forget at any moment that Algeria is one of
the greater world-wide agricultural product importers. So there is no doubt that
agriculture, and concretely the agro-alimentary sector, they can become a key
sector for the Algerian development in terms of use and reduction of the
dependency of the imports, but hardly will be able to generate excessive
exportable a significant one in the next years.
Yet, so and as it demonstrates the stagnation of the exports different from
hydrocarbons registered in spite of the strong depreciation of dinar between
May of 1999 and November of 2000 (next one to 20%[
68 ]), the elasticity of the exportable
supply in the present economic conditions is, since it has been seen, very low
or null. This is explained by a combination of several factors: the lack of
industralists and enterprising spirit ready to play with the rules of free
market without the support of the powers public, the nonexistence of an
effective financial sector that guarantees the credits for the institutional
expansion of the companies and restrictions - or bureaucratic-that continue
preventing the legal exports (own President Bouteflika referred, in a speech,
to the "Mafia of the containers" in the Algerian ports).
With regards to the industrial policy - at the moment nonexistent -, it
will have to quite often concentrate in the renovation - in terms of equipment
and also of management and the reactivation of the public companies (during
years conceived like more terminals of the system of distribution of the
petroliferous rent that like nodes of the productive weave), facilitating the
joint between the private sector and the public sector to safeguard and to
mobilize the physical patrimony and know how accumulated throughout the
years in those public companies and to undertake a decided policy of
modernization, but also of promotion of new companies and new sectors (Algeria,
for example, is a great product importer derived from the petroleum of low
technological content as it can be asphalt or the adhesives). The importance of
undertaking an integral policy of increase of the productivity of the Algerian
companies is difficult to exaggerate: according to Arab Human Development
Report (the PNUD 2002, p. 87), Algeria is the Arab country (with exception
of the Comores Islands) with the level more under productivity of the physical
capital (effectiveness of the investments), which comes to add itself to a low
productivity of the manual labor. In fact, the productivity by worker fell in
an annual 2.2% between 1989 and 1997[
69 ]. He is this, more than the reduction of
the investment level, which explains the lack of economic growth that has been
indicated before[
70 ]. But the advances of the productivity
will not serve as anything without a change policy that ends the endemic
appreciation of dinar (corrected to a certain extent from 1999), that threatens
to the competitiveness of the Algerian companies in the outer markets.
5. e) the sector of hydrocarbons and its
sistémico paper
The sector of hydrocarbons continues being a sector of first necessity for
the Algerian economy, since in the short term it is the only trustworthy
currency source, the only certain comparative advantage and the main source of
accumulation of capital (the cost of the extraction of petroleum in Algeria is
of approximately 4 USS by barrel, and their proximity to the European markets,
that reduce the costs of the transport and allow the export through
gaseoductos, grants to Algeria a comparative advantage in this last sector).
The allocation of these limited resources (the currencies) is necessarily a
public function, mainly in a country with an nourishing dependency so
defendant. The hydrocarbon reserves allow Algeria to have resolute the first problem
of the development of any country, the one of the accumulation of capital, but
it does not solve the one of the distribution and the mobilization of such
resources, that in addition they create very serious problems of efficiency of
the economic system.
The reform of the sector of hydrocarbons is a ilustrativo case to determine
the real manoeuvre margin of the Algerian Government between the opposed
pressures of the international markets (like expression of these last ones, the
Undersecretary of State of Commerce of the United States, Samuel Bodman, in
visit in Algiers the 27 of September of 2002, declared that "Algeria must
open its legislation in the sector of hydrocarbons. The time urges "[
71 ]) and the internal forces opposed the
change of statu quo.
In any case, it is evident that Algeria will run into more soon than late
with the limits of its capacities of gross petroleum export: as opposed to its
quota in OPEC of 693.000[
72 ] daily barrels, Algeria has been exporting
for two years an average of 848.000 daily barrels (and Sonatrach anticipates an
increase of its production up to 1.3 daily million). But the policy of
diversification of Sonatrach has made possible that gross petroleum (the only
product object of quotas) does not suppose already more than 20% of the income
by hydrocarbon exports, thanks to the bet for the increase of the condensed
production of of petroleum and natural gas. Beyond the increase of the gas
production, there is a great margin to increase the exports of energy under the
form of electricity (already exist several projects in course with Spanish and
Italian companies) and by means of the expansion of the petrochemical, so far
clearly underdeveloped sector, and other intensive sectors in energy.
It can say that the management of the generation of the oil rent has been
the scope in which the people in charge of the Algerian economic policy have
shown a greater skill from the modifications introduced in the hydrocarbon Law
in 1991, because the opening of the exploration and the operation to the
multinational oil companies have allowed simultaneously to increase the
discoveries of new reserves[
73 ] and to attract capitals this sector for
the financing of its expansion[
74 ].
The will of a part of the Government to reform this sector took shape in
March of 2001 with a first draft of hydrocarbon law presented/displayed by the
Minister of Energy that has caused one aggravated opposition and that finally
does not seem that it is not even going to be considered. This project of
hydrocarbon Law anticipates the segregation of SONATRACH in three
organizations:
1) an agency that would assume the function of proprietor of the mining
public dominion (the national Agency for the valuation of the hydrocarbon
resources), and therefore the management of the concessions of exploration
and/or operation (in any case, it seems that 43% of the oil dominion will be
reserved to SONATRACH);
2) an authority of regulation of the
hydrocarbons that will regulate the tariffs of transport and access to the
SONATRACH network and that will control the activity of hydrocarbon operation;
5. f) the institutional frame and the paper of the
State
Actually, in Algeria the risk is run of creating one market economy
without markets: more of three years after the arrival to the power of the
new President, it is continued reciting like a distant objective the fact that
the implantation of a market economy is not sufficient, but that it must be
also a liberal economy; the private property must be completed by means of own
norms of mercantile Right of a liberal economy in the matter of competition,
protection of the intellectual property, fulfillment of contracts, collection
of the debts, norms of quality, etc.[ 76 ] Now well, these norms intimately are bound to an equally
liberal political system, that is to say, to a State of Right.
omnipresencia of the informal economy, that has become an
authentic valve of escape and lubricant for the deficiencies of the Algerian
economic system, dilutes all the reforms that the weight needs Algeria (the
informal economy is considered by own Gobierno, probably to the loss, in 30% of
the GIP and approximately a million uses[
77 ]). The submerged economy creates
important distortions in the operation of all the Algerian economic
institutions: in the operation of the markets, subjects to a disloyal
competition in terms of prices and often also of qualities, but also in the
mechanisms of intervention of the State, because it reduces his tributary base.
A schematic modelización of the Algerian economic system (it see graph 3)[
78 ] it shows that an important part of the
economic circuits operates to the margin of the market: transferences of the
State to the public companies and the population, evidently, but also one
leaves from the economic flows between the private sector and the international
consumers and between these two economic agents and markets very important (by
means of the contraband). As a result of it, the market is elevated every time
in greater measurement in Algeria like an instance of circulation or
accomplishment of the rents[
79 ], but rarely like space of generation of
such rents. Until the point of which, in Algeria, it is possible to speak of
the existence of mercantile circuits of accomplishment and distribution of the
rents, more than of the market like mechanism of production and distribution of
the income. Also, the market does not perform its function theoretical of
integration either, but simply a function of interaction between the economic
agents. Consequently, the market does not work as mechanism of signals nor
necessarily stimulates the increase of the productivity.
This takes necessarily to the tributary question: between the 60 and 70% of
the income of the State have their origin in the sector of hydrocarbons, and
another 10% in the customs tariffs[
80 ] so that less from 25% of the income of
the State they come from the taxes (in fact, the ordinary fiscality, that in
1997 16.2% of the GIP supposed, has been reduced to 14.7% of the GIP in 2000).
Even so, with the simple strict application of the effective tributary
legislation, these total fiscal income could be duplicated easily, but it would
estimate the existence of a political legitimacy and an administrative capacity
of the Government that, in the case of Algeria, are far from being evident.
To the dynamism of the parallel circuits and to the sustracción of the
income to the fiscality of the State they add the extended corruption to all
the levels[
81 ] and recognized by the own authorities,
including the justice administration. the fact is that, for a great part
of the private sector - in any case, for all the significant parts of the same
one -, the proximity to the circuits of the power continues being so important
to prosper as the productivity and the competitiveness of the companies.
GRAPH 3.
SCHEME OF THE ALGERIAN ECONOMIC SYSTEM
international Markets
6. Conclusion
Algeria presents/displays many of the main elements that characterize to an
economy in transition of an economy planned towards a market economy. But,
unlike which it has happened in the case of other countries, as much their
authorities as the international community seem pawned on impelling that
transition without a previous mutation of the structures of being able and the
behaviors of the power, that is to say, without an effective transition in the
political system[
82 ]. This is something that begins to
demonstrate itself more and more difficult.
In these three years, the Bouteflika governments have mainly counted,
apparently, with the effect announcement of their reforms. It is certain that
they have undertaken very necessary a preparatory work, but without getting to
make reality neither the practical application of those reforms nor a growth and
an improvement of the conditions of life of the population, but simply a
greater financial frecuentabilidad of Algeria. The hyperactivity of these
governments with regards to programs of reform in all the scopes
(information, announcements, although nondebates with the social interlocutors)
has not been translated, in most of the cases, not even in the approval of a
legislative frame for the application of these reforms (since it has happened
in the case of the new hydrocarbon law, of the banking reform, the
privatizations or the reform of the regime of property of agricultural earth).
Meanwhile, the situation of the population has not let degrade itself (and,
therefore, the material bases of the social instability have not let
consolidate), and the irregular circuits of the Algerian economic system have
continued being developed (appropriation of the sources of rent by groups of
interests in the borders of the power, expansion of the informal sector...).
With regards to the decisions indeed applied (in individual, the
company/signature in the Agreement of Association with the European Union), a
common element all of them it is that one is decisions with deferred effects in
the time (in the case in the Agreement of Association, like minimum during a
term of ten years), although, if an appropriate strategy is not adopted to face
the same ones, they will be able to become an additional factor of
destabilization in the mid term.
This approach seems to see itself confirmed by the proliferation of
initiatives ad hoc in order to face the conjunctural urgencies or more
often by precise conflicts or directly shaken against the authorities. To use
the expression of Forum DES Chefs d'Entreprise[
83 ], "what happens it is that, to lack
it is a solid frame of reference and consensuado, the economic action of the
authorities day to day is resembled a continuous series of improvisations
determined by the immediate conjuncture more and more" and could also say
that by the international pressures.
In these circumstances, all the conditions seem reunited for the launching
of a great national program of investment of Keynsian inspiration[
84 ], the only one that seems able to
contribute simultaneous solutions to all the great problems of the Algerian
economy. These investments would have to be concentrated in social
infrastructures (house and system of water distribution, mainly) and physical
(specially, the infrastructures of communications and medio.ambiente) and human
(specially education and formation). This, together with a plan of reconversion
and relaunching of the national industry and the agricultural production and to
the effective application of the enunciated structural reforms for as much time
(that yes, with the necessary social consensus that it would be facilitated
within the framework of a general program of investments) could create the
necessary conditions for the development of the private sector and for a
process of massive creation of use and economic growth. But so that the bond
between public investment and growth and use works actually this plan would
have to go accompanied of a fiscal reform in depth (that the subjection of all
the economic agents to the tax system guarantees, for which is required once
again of an ample political consensus, in addition to an improvement of the
administrative efficiency) and the elimination - unavoidably progressive of the
circuits of the informal economy and the contraband. Otherwise, the risk of
which is run the resources injected in the economic system by means of the
physical investments they leaked towards the informal economy, since it
seems to have happened to the investments of the plan of support to the
economic relaunching, and in fact contributed to perpetuate and to reproduce
the inherited rentistas situations. That is to say, it will have to be come to
a recentraje of the flows economic on the markets and to eliminate the circuits
progressively parallels (it see the scheme of graph 3) that reduces
transparency to the Algerian economic system.
In this context, the opening of the economy is not in high-priority nor
urgent itself nor, although the horizon of the zone of free commerce with the
European Union - either it jeopardize-and of the adhesion to the OMC - in
negotiation course, but very outpost-it could play a far from negligible
catalytic role for the Algerian economic modernization and the effective
modernization of its companies, as long as an ample consensus articulates
around this commercial opening that serves as base to define a national
strategy to face the challenges that raise - with transactions and
compensations between the winning and losing social groups of this process and
the mobilization of resources of all type to take it upon maturity. In any
case, he is urgent to undertake the accomplishment of studies detailed by
sectors of the impact of the opening in production terms and quota of market,
use, income of the public sector, etc. in order to give transparency to the
process and, mainly, to be able to formulate strategy of optimization of the
transition towards this opening and to react to the despicable risks in way
some that it involves.
All it will have to register necessarily in a set project that, in the case
of a country like Algeria, must have the reach of true a new social contract
that implied all the social and economic and important actors. But this
constitutional refundación for the development, even talking about
fundamentally to questions relative to the economic organization, requires of a
social and political dynamics that exceeds much with the limits of the purely
economic policy. It also estimates to articulate a social consensus of bottom
and to deactivate the created interests - economic, but also politicians who
always have prevented the reforms.
Evidently, a program of this spread would put the structures of being able
at issue economic that exist at the moment in Algeria: "an economic reform
in Algeria depends on the implantation of effective institutions that work
under the democratic control and the authority and of the Law"[
85 ]. In other terms, "the reform in a
regime of always bunker is very problematic, since the economic liberalization
demands a change of the political system" and "the adjustment to the
global economy, by necessary that it is, will put" this regime at issue[
86 ].
Really, normalization economic in Algeria he is still pending, no
matter how hard their leaders do not save any effort to convince to us
otherwise, and hardly will take place without a previous normalization of the
political system, that also is far from having culminated. The perspective for
both next years are not better either: the electoral appointment of the
presidential ones of April of 2004 runs the risk of blocking any new initiative
of economic policy. Meanwhile, the social instability is fed and - such time
the emigration with another lost lustrum that comes to add itself to the lost
decade of years 1990.
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* This work has been possible thanks to the
support of Centre d'Études ET of Recherches Internationales (CERI) of Sciences
Po, of Paris. Electronic mail of the author: immartin@der-pu.uc3m.it is
[ 1 ] Newspaper Him Matin, 1 of June of 2002.
[ 2 ] Speech of Ali Benflis with
occasion of the closing of the work groups on the Platform of El-Kseur, 7 of
February of 2002.
[ 3 ] CNES (2002).
[ 4 ] It see Mohsen-Finan (2002, p.
17).
[ 5 ] The complete list of the
popular revolts would be troublesome. There is week in which the Algerian press
does not become echo of violent incidents of protest of the population in a
point and no another one of the country. To the margin of the region of
Kabylia, only in the four first months of 2002 it is possible to mention the
registered violent manifestations in the municipality of Aïn Fekroun, to the
west of the country, to protest against the new policy of copayment of the
medical aid in the hospitals public, the riots of the prisoners and their
relatives in Algiers after the fire of a prison, the sackings in the cities
Saharan of El-Goléa and d'In-Salah against the policy of selection of personnel
of a multinational oil company...
[ 6 ] The platform of El-Kseur is a
list of vindications presented/displayed by the representatives of the
vilayatos of the Kabilia the 11 of June of 2001 as a result of the revolts
against the power established registered from the 18 of April in all the
region. Four of the fifteen vindications of the platform are of socioeconomic
nature; three of character general and programmatic ("By a State which it
guarantees all the socioeconomic rights", "Against the policies of
subdevelopment, pauperización and miserabilización of the Algerian town"
and "By a socieconómico plan of emergency for all the region of the
Kabilia") and one very concrete one ("Creation of a benefit of
unemployment for all the applicants of use by amount of 50% of the minimum
wage").
[ 7 ] Surely this it is the concept
more used to interpret the political economy of Algeria. Recently, it see
Dillman (2000), that offers a revision of the theory of the rentista State
applied to Algeria (pp. 11-15).
[ 8 ] Talahite (2000).
[ 9 ] Martinez (1998).
[ 10 ] Defined like "governed
petrorianas republics material or metafóricamente from búnkeres", whose
more well-known example, according to Henry and Springborg (2001), is indeed
the case of Algeria (it see chapter 4). According to the authors, these States
are "those that present/display a smaller institutional capacity to manage
their own economies of all the States of Oriente.medio and North Africa. [... ]
Is the countries that have a submerged economy more extended [... ] the fiscal
income to the margin of the sector of hydrocarbons are meager, and a part of
these income takes control the clans leaders. [... ] the technocracies of these
regimes has few opportunities to act or to even influence in the policies,
since the normal thing is that the dominant clans filter and distort the
economic information. None significant economic organization, neither public
nor deprived, saves to the attitude pregiver of the governors, although some
companies [... ] enjoy a special protection. The private industralists can
accumulate capital, but only in the measurement in which they enjoy the special
favor of those who control the military services or security "(p. 100).
[ 11 ] It see, for example, the
inaugural speech of President Bouteflika, the 1 of June of 1999: "I
declare It with all clarity: the State is ill. Patient of its institutions.
Patient of its administration. Patient of its fraudulent practices on great
scale, of the clientelism, the abuses of force and authority, of so frequent
inefficiency and the vanity in the use of the resources, the injustificados
privileges, the wastes and the unpunished deviation of the collective resources
".
[ 12 ] To retake a current expression
in those years (Stone 1997, p. 10). Of the same author of this study, a effort
in that same sense undertaken for some years in a work document has been able
to be seen on "Algeria: economic approach to the crisis "(Martín
1998).
[ 13 ] In this respect, it can be
useful to consult the report of the International Group Crisis (2001)"the
Algerian economy: the vicious circle of petroleum and the violence ".
[ 14 ] Other statistical sources (for
example, Eurostat, the Office Nationale de Algerian Statistiques or the
World-wide Organization of the Work offer different numbers slightly, as a rule
still more alarming: pro example, according to the numbers used by Keller and Nabli
(2002, p. 21), would be necessary to create more than 500.000 uses to the year
instead of the 300.000 calculated here.
[ 15 ] Keller and Nabli (2002, p. 1).
The official numbers of unemployment of the Arab countries surely are
underestimated (ibid., p. 4).
[ 16 ] This creation of use would
allow to reduce the rate of unemployment to 24% of the active populace in the
2010 and to 20% in the 2020, that is to say, to locate it in a term of twenty
years in a level next to the average of the Arab countries.
[ 17 ] Any level below the 1.000 ms3 annual it indicates a situation of
structural shortage. It
is possible that there is not a so acute symptom of the lack of vision of the
economic policy (or the policy simply) Algerian like the incapacity of the
authorities to guarantee the water supplying of the city of Algiers, that it
counts with more than four million inhabitants, and in whom for several years
its inhabitants they have only been having running water during one of every
two days, and even one of every three days in summer. In addition, frequently
one is cloudy water.
[ 18 ] Office Nationale DES
Statistiques, census of 2001.
[ 19 ] 66% for milky products and 95%
for oils, not to speak but of traditionally produced agricultural products in
the field in Algeria.
[ 20 ] Algerian ministry of Property
(2002).
[ 21 ] A variation of 1 USS of the
international prices of petroleum gives rise to a variation of 700 million USS
of the exports and of 500 million USS, that is to say, a 3% of the budget of
the State, of the budgetary income (Aïssaoui 2001, p. 240).
[ 22 ] Throughout this work, any
distinction between the successive governments will not become of President
Bouteflika: the government of Ismail Hamdani (December of 1998-December of
1999) that had inherited of the previous president, the government of Amhed
Benbitour (December of 1999-August of 2000) and both governments of Ali Benflis
(August of 2000-June of 2002 and as of June of 2002): although the government
teams have changed partially also in the economic ministries, and although the
kind observers detect certain variations of style, the certain thing is that a
solution of continuity among them with regards to the economic policy is not
appraised, but rather a high degree of continuity - not necessarily coherence
that seems guaranteed by own President Bouteflika, who manages the great
economic files directly. The apparent internal contradictions between members
"technocrats" and "politicians" of the government - like
whom they have extended between the then Minister of the Participation and of
the Coordination of the Reforms, Abdelhamid Temmar, and the own Amhed Benbitour
or between the Minister of Energy, Chakib Khelil, and Prime minister Ali
Benflis- either does not justify a differentiated approach.
[ 23 ] The three presented/displayed
programs of government before the Popular National Assembly by Prime minister Benbitour
in December of 1999 and by Prime minister Benflis in September of 2000 and July
of 2002 are quite generic.
[ 24 ] The IMF (2001a), p. 4.
[ 25 ] Office of Agency AFP of Algiers
of 16 of April of 2002.
[ 26 ] The balance by current account
has happened of a deficit of the 1.9% of the GIP in 1998 to an excess of 16.7%
in 2000 and of 12.4% in the 2001. For 2002, the Ministry of Property
anticipates new an excess of 12.5% of the GIP, approximately 7.000 million USS.
It must remember that, from a macroeconomic point of view, the balance by
current account represents the difference between the national saving and the
national investment; therefore, a balance by reflected positive current account
the fact that the country not the other way around finances the investments
(and the development) of the other countries of the world and, as it would seem
logical.
[ 27 ] Nevertheless, Aïssaoui (2001,
pp. 29-30) it observes that the 22.000 million dollars reached in 2001 only
represent 40% of the maximum income in obtained real terms in 1981.
[ 28 ] It is necessary to observe
that, until 1999, he was frequent which the Algerian political people in charge
tried to explain - or to justify the Algerian crisis economic by the evolution
of the international prices of petroleum, giving to understand that the
situation would improve the prices as soon as returned to raise.
[ 29 ] Data base of World Development
Indicators.
[ 30 ] Report on Human Development
2001, the PNUD.
[ 31 ] Speech pronounced with occasion
of the inauguration of the Economic Forum Algerian-Spanish, Madrid, 7 of
October of 2002, p. 5.
[ 32 ] The IMF (2001a), p. 5. Aïssaoui
(2001, p. 27) it speaks of "reforms audacious, but postponed".
[ 33 ] Report on Human
Development 2003. It is necessary to indicate,
nevertheless, that most of the Arab countries mainly presents/displays
"rates of negative transformation" of the wealth in well-being
strongly which had to the social situation of the woman.
[ 34 ] European commission (2002, p.
10).
[ 35 ] The causes of this
backward movement are the increase of the effective commercial protection and
an increase of the inflation, as well as the impatience by the slowness of the
process of privatizations, concretely in the banking sector (it see HTTP://cf.heritage.org/index/country.cfm?ID=2.0).
[ 36 ] For an analysis of the
obstacles to the privatizations and the interests created around the public
companies, Werenfels can be ***reflxed mng usefully (2002).
[ 37 ] It see Algeria Interface,
"Privatisations: them banques attendront ", 6 of November of 2002.
[ 38 ] According to the estimations of
the IMF (2001a, p. 9), from 1998 the private sector has surpassed to the public
sector if the hydrocarbons are excepted and experiences annual rates of growth
of between 6% and 8%, representing in 2000 already 55% of the added value gross
national. Without embargo, in the industrial sector the public companies
continue supposing near three fourth parts of the production, and in a series
of articles published in the newspaper The Watan days 10, 11 and 12 of
October of 2000 by A. Bouyacoub, this one affirmed that the percentage of the
credits granted by the banks to the private sector did not happen of 19% in
1999, as opposed to 32% in 1994 (in a memorandum published in December of 2002,
Forum DES Chefs DES Entreprises offers radically different numbers: 20% in 1997
and 36% in 2001). This does not prevent that the private sector is experiencing
a true explosion of its activities in sectors like the construction, the
internal transport, the commerce and even the textile sector, and in a minor
measured in the agricultural sector; at the end of 2002, the Egyptian group
Orascom obtained a credit of 60 million euros of the European Bank of
Investment to install in Algeria the first private cementera (until the moment,
the percentage of foreign property in the capital of the cementeras was limited
49%), and speech of plans to privatize other three cementeras.
[ 39 ] A econométrica relation between
the density of telephone lines installed in a country and its level of
development exists. MEDA Telecom Observatory, NATP Highlights 1/3 (2002):
HTTP://meda.encip.org/highlights/issue1_3_2.HTML.
[ 40 ] Extracted data of the
confidential bulletin Spanish Magreb Businesses of October of 2002, p. 6.
[ 41 ] 52 by each 1.000 inhabitants,
as opposed to 90 in Tunisia and 53 in Morocco (the PNUD 2002, p. 156).
[ 42 ] The PNUD 2002, p. 77.
[ 43 ] "Réformes économiques,
privatisation, to foncier agricole. Au stade DES hésitations ", newspaper I
freed of 11 of November of 2002.
[ 44 ] CNES (2002): South Rapport
conjoncture économique ET sociale du to premier semestral 2002.
[ 45 ] Nevertheless, this growth is
explained in good part by the registered agricultural crisis during the 2000
campaign (because of the drought). In 2002, the agricultural production
returned to increase in a 8%.
[ 46 ] In this respect, d'Entreprise
in its bulletin is extremely clarificadora the position adopted by Forum DES
Chefs from the month October of 2002 dans (it see the newspaper I freed
of 17 of November of 2002).
[ 47 ] Supervisory association that,
although does not represent more than to 68 companies (among them some public
and some foreigners), it has quickly acquired the great protagonism in the
economic debate in Algeria).
[ 48 ] Ibid.
[ 49 ] The IMF (2001b), p. 3. The
index of prices to the official consumption is continued calculating, for
example, with base in a product basket elaborated in 1988, and it does not
consider the prices applied in the informal markets (this situation must have
corrected at the end of 2002, after processing the results of the survey of
familiar budgets of the Office Nationale DES Statistiques).
[ 50 ] "the State is incapable to
determine the exact number of unemployed and [ less even has parameters to
evaluate the real rate of inflation... ] no government has made a balance sheet
from the launching of the reforms" (interview with Abdelmajid Sidi-Saïd,
Secretary General of the main Algerian union - antigüo unique union -, the
General Union of Algerian Workers, published in the newspaper of Algiers Tribune,
25 of July of 2002); véanse also the protests in this respect of Forum DES
Chefs d'Entreprise (note 46).
[ 51 ] It see Mañé (1998).
[ 52 ] If the perspective of
development of the sector of hydrocarbons consider, Algeria could obtain
international credits for the sum of more easily than 10.000 million short term
USS, which would locate the outer coefficient of national debt on the GIP in a
60%, below the sustainable level considered for countries even developed (for
example, within the framework of European the Economic and Monetary Union.)
with many less primary necessities to satisfy.
[ 53 ] Keller and Nabli (2002, p. 1).
[ 54 ] Keller and Nabli (2002, p. 4).
[ 55 ] Around 127 workers by each
million USS of production (Aïssaoui 2001, p. 238). Significantly, the author
dedicates the three last pages of his book on the political economy of
petroleum and the gas in Algeria to the question of the use.
[ 56 ] Keller and Nabli (2001, pp.
15-16).
[ 57 ] The IMF (2001a), p. 24.
[ 58 ] The 1 of January of 2002, nº
01-02 of 20 of August of 2001, relative one to the reform of the system of
customs tariffs took effect the dispositions of the Decree. To the margin of
104 free products of any tariff, for the concerned insumos (raw materials and
falsified goods of equipment, pharmaceutical products and cereals, altogether
1.417 games of the customs tariff) the customs rights were reduced to 5%, and
15% for half-finished goods (1.875 tariff games). In addition, the increased
customs tariff (the Maxima rate of applicable protection in Algeria) applicable
to finished products, concretely the nourishing products, the textiles, the
drinks and other final consumer goods, with the exception of medicines and
automobiles (2.532 games) were reduced from 45% to 30%. For 48 specially
sensible products - finished industrial goods -, the application of specific
tariffs by product (under the form of the administrative determination of the
value in customs) was replaced by provisional an additional right of 48%, that
must be reduced in 12 percentage points every year until their total
disappearance in 2006. One is about the greater tariff reduction in its recent
history and, mainly, a great operation of clarification of the commercial
protection in Algeria. In any case, it does not have to forget that, quite
often, the commercial protection in Algeria does not adopt the form of tariff
barriers, but of administrative or bureaucratic barriers, that sometimes they
prevent, simply, the product import certain, so that real the commercial
protection necessarily does not have a direct bond with the customs tariff.
[ 59 ] The IMF denominates
"strict management of the demand" ("tight demand
management"; The IMF 2001a, p. 4).
[ 60 ] The European
Parliament ratified the 10 of October of 2002, accompanied by one long
resolution of 25 points without no diplomatic precedent in an act of this
nature (Resolution P5_TA-PROV(2002)0462) in
that it urged to the communitarian Institutions and the Algerian authorities to
guarantee the respect of the human rights, that constitutes an essential
element of the association and, in concrete, to thus coming to "the
suspension del state of emergency, emergency situation" and to "the
solution del problem from the disappear and the elimination from all form from
impunity" like a that "do all the possible one for that the Agreement
of Association allows to the improvement of the economic and social situation
del Algerian town and, in individual, of its youth", "expresses its
restlessness by the existing corruption in different sectors in Algeria"
and "it reaffirms the necessity of a retirement of the military of the
political process of adoption of decisions ".
[ 61 ] Since one has become, for
example, in the case of the Lebanon, that it later signed the Agreement of
Association that Algeria (the 19 of June of 2002), but in which a provisional
Agreement has been celebrated that the 1 of February of 2003 will take effect.
[ 62 ] The European customs tariffs on
the Algerian industrial exports already were suppressed in the Seventies, and
agriculture provisionally is excluded from the zone of free commerce.
[ 63 ] Apparently, until any serious
and complete study of impact of the zone of free commerce has the present not
been made in Algeria.
[ 64 ] When being approved the new
Code of 1993 investments. Order 01-03 of 20 of August of 2001 on the
development of the investment replaced this Code by a still more favorable
norm. But the character in arbitrary itself of the incentives to the investment
is illustrated by the intervention of the Algerian Minister of the
Participation and the Coordination of the Reforms perfectly at that time, Mr..
Boukrouh, in an organized colloquy the 18 of October of 2001 in the French
Senate: "a national Advice of investments has been created. This political
authority, presided over by the Head of Government, can meet at any time to
grant to a certain investor advantages that are not predicted in the number
Code of investments ".
[ 65 ] The accumulated total stock of
foreign investments is considered in near 10.000 million USS, mainly in the
sector of hydrocarbons.
[ 66 ] For an analysis of the causes
and perspective of the investment it extracted in the countries of the Maghreb,
can consultarse Martín (2000).
[ 67 ] Mainly with regards to the
third part of the earth that continue being of public titularidad but which
they are managed by private agriculturists.
[ 68 ] Later, dinar has become
stabilized in a band of fluctuation of between 75 and 80 dinares by USS (80
during 2002); judging by the black currency market, dinar continues relatively
being appreciated, since the type of change in the free trade is located
between 96 and 98 dinares by USS, that is to say, a 20% over the official type.
[ 69 ] Keller and Nabli (2002, p. 5).
[ 70 ] In fact, according to the
calculations made by the IMF (2001a, p. 17), the total productivity of the
factors has not either let diminish from 1974, and all the growth experienced
by Algeria is explained by the accumulation of productive factors (work and
capital). However, Keller and Nabli (2002, p. 14) they conclude that, during
the Nineties, the total productivity of the factors increased slightly, in an
annual 0.88%.
[ 71 ] It is possible to ask itself
for whom.
[ 72 ] That, nevertheless, it has been
increased to 1.1 million daily barrels in the last days of 2002, which means an
increase of near 2.000 million annual USS of its income by exports.
[ 73 ] At the moment esteem that the
existing reserves are sufficient for 45 years of consumption and exports (Aïssaoui
2001, pp. 278-282), whereas still in 1996 the exhaustion of the reserves in a
term of little was anticipated more than 20 years (BP Statistical Review of
World Energy, June of 1996).
[ 74 ] About 45 contracts celebrated
with 27 foreign companies.
[ 75 ] An analysis of the reform of
the sector of hydrocarbons and the forces can be that are against to her in
Aïssaoui (2001, pp. 27-34 and 217-220).
[ 76 ] Speech of Minister Abdelhamid
Temmar in the economic Forum Algerian-Spanish, Madrid, 7 of October of 2002.
[ 77 ] In order to relativize these
numbers, it agrees to remember that the estimations of the volume of the
economy submerged in Spain, Italy or Greece locate it in the surroundings of
25%.
[ 78 ] A similar scheme for the political
system could be elaborated, in which it would be seen that an important part of
the flows of being able is located to the margin of the electoral system, the
political parties and even the own Government.
[ 79 ] By rents, we understand the
income nongained by means of the economic use of the production factors. In an
ideal market economy, only the State perceives rents.
[ 80 ] In Algeria, it has at the
moment around 960.000 contributors, among them 58.000 legal people, and the
fiscal pressure of the personal taxes is considered between 13% and 15%.
[ 81 ] The book of Hadjadj (2001) is
extremely ilustrativo in this respect.
[ 82 ] The exception constitutes it, evidently,
China and, with their own modalities, Russia and the States coming from the
Commonwealth of Independent States.
[ 83 ] It see note 50.
[ 84 ] In the press conference that
followed its famous conference "the economic possibilities of our
grandsons" pronounced by the great economist John Maynard the Keyneses in
the Residence of Students of Madrid the 8 of June of 1930, asked for its
opinion on the level of reserves in gold that then had Spain, its answer was
the following one: "the Spanish economy has at the moment
presents/displays a level of reserves that appears between most important of
all the countries of the world. It makes no sense that a poor country as Spain
has not used and does not use those reserve-gold to use them in a development
program that will locate in a better position to the country and its population
". The same it could have said in 2002 of Algeria.
[ 85 ] International Group Crisis
(2001), p. 17.
[ 86 ] Henry and Springborg (2002, pp.
121-122).
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