center on capitalism and society at columbia university and a professor of economics at lebanese american university safe welcome to the kaiser report thank you all right so if you recently wrote a piece for the financial times called too much aid hobble the arab spring first tell us what are our economic issues economic issues behind the arab spring and then whether this western aid and debt will address any of these economic issues a lot of these problems were economic it wasn't exclusively economic but a lot of it was a comic and the real economic problems i feel are the government control over the various sectors of the economy which was something that was strengthened over the past couple of decades through international institutions supervision of privatization programs which ended up strengthening the hand of the robot and then ali regimes in those countries and allowing them and their cronies to control more and more of the economic activity of the country and of the switch in rich them while at the same time that i know a lot about the comic opportunities for everybody else in society i thi