Dr. Karen Young talked about her new book, "The Economic Statecraft of the Gulf Arab States," which discusses the deployment of aid, investment, and direct support from some of the wealthiest petrostates of the world to their surrounding sphere of influence within the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, and West Asia.
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Dr. Young is Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University in the Center for Global Energy Policy. She was a senior fellow and founding director of the Program on Economics and Energy at the Middle East Institute and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. She has published "The Political Economy of Energy, Finance and Security in the United Arab Emirates" (2014) and her analysis has appeared in Bloomberg Opinion, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Financial Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.
"Karen Young explores two issues central to the future of development in the broader Middle East region in this book. First, how Gulf economic statecraft is affecting and will affect the development trajectory of the countries that receive Gulf aid and investment.
Second, how the Chinese and Gulf development models and policies in the region both challenge the Washington consensus and compete with each other. The book is a welcome primer to how to understand these key issues." F. Gregory Gause, Texas A&M University
"This meticulously detailed and extraordinarily timely analysis of economic statecraft in the context of the Gulf Arab States sheds valuable light on the political motivations and policy tools that are reshaping patterns of aid, development, and investment strategies
across the Middle East and North Africa at a time of enormous volatility and great uncertainty in the global economic and energy landscape." Kristian Ulrichsen, Rice University
