Qaddafi’s extreme makeover

MAHMUD TURKIA/AFP Has Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi reinvented himself as one of the Chicago Boyz? In a gesture of structural adjustment worthy of Augusto Pinochet, Qaddafi is firing 400,000 of the country’s 1 million civil servants. The country’s unemployment rate is already at least 13 percent. Prime Minister al-Baghdadi Ali al-Mahmoudi explained to the parliament ...

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604659_gaddafi8.jpg

MAHMUD TURKIA/AFP

MAHMUD TURKIA/AFP

Has Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi reinvented himself as one of the Chicago Boyz? In a gesture of structural adjustment worthy of Augusto Pinochet, Qaddafi is firing 400,000 of the country’s 1 million civil servants. The country’s unemployment rate is already at least 13 percent. Prime Minister al-Baghdadi Ali al-Mahmoudi explained to the parliament that the firings were part of the country’s effort to encourage private sector productivity and meet a $30 billion budget for 2007. With oil prices still hovering at around $53 a barrel, Qaddafi may be running up against Thomas Friedman’s First Law of Petropolitics:



According to the First Law of Petropolitics, the lower the price of oil, the more petrolist countries are forced to move toward a political system and a society that is more transparent, more sensitive to opposition voices, and more focused on building the legal and educational structures that will maximize their people’s ability, both men’s and women’s, to compete, start new companies, and attract investments from abroad.

It remains to be seen, however, whether a large and now-unemployed (and probably angry) segment of the country’s comparative best and brightest can succeed, as Qaddafi hopes, in establishing an import-competitive manufacturing sector in a country heavily dominated by its oil industry.

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