Economic Liberalisation, Social Capital and Islamic Welfare Provision

JANE HARRIGAN is Professor of Economics and Head of the Economics Department at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK. She has studied at Oxford and Cambridge Universities and at Harvard and was previously a Senior Lecturer at Manchester University, UK. She is co-author of the two-volume book Aid and Power: The World Bank and Policy-Based Lending (with Paul Mosley and John Toye) and author of From Dictatorship to Democracy: Economic Policy in Malawi 1964-2000. She has written extensively on World Bank and IMF programmes in developing countries with a focus on both sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East and North Africa. She also works on issues concerning aid, agricultural policy and food security in sub-Saharan Africa.

This book looks at two aspects of Islamic activity in the Middle East and North Africa, the development of social capital and the provision of welfare services, within the context of economic liberalisation programmes to see whether the retrenchment of the state under liberalisation has created a space for Islamic-based activities.