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Following the Baath Party’s coup d’état in 1963, most of the developmental drive of the country focused on land reforms and state-led development. The Party, inspired by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s agenda in Egypt, put the state economy under extreme pressure, since it aimed at providing free education, undertaking large industrial projects, and promoting state interventionism in the state economy without solving the issues of low productivity and high corruption, in addition to struggling to keep up with population growth. However, the neopatrimonial structure of the Syrian regime maintained corruption at high levels through the decades, and according to Transparency International data, Syria was ranked 127 out of 178 countries in the 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index.
Gradually, Import-Substitution Industrialization (ISI)—that is, the replacement of foreign imports with domestic production—was abandoned in favour of market-driven liberalization. The withdrawal of the state from the economy happened in two major waves; the first in the early 1970s and the second in the mid-1980s. During the 1970s, agrarian reforms had been a key policy, but were later reversed into privatization of the land—a key feature of the rule of Assad fils. On the other hand, in the 1980s—in an attempt to contain domestic discontent and to restart the economic engine of the country—Hafez al-Assad pushed a neoliberal opening to foreign capital and ‘liberated’ the economy from public-sector domination, while still maintaining an extensive bureaucratic apparatus. By the 1980s the bureaucratic and public sector alone employed approximately 20% of the total workforce of the country.
full: https://www.aljumhuriya.net/en/content/socio-economic-roots-syria%E2%80%99s-uprising
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