An Empirical Descriptive Analysis of the Factors underlying the Role of Younger Generations in Economic, Social & Political Changes in Arab Countries

Abstract: This is to provide empirical evidence on the likely roles of knowledge, social networks and Information Technologies (IT) besides governance in shaping the characteristics of the current generation of youth in comparison with the oldest ones. The framework of intergenerational mobility provides promising grounds for the empirical analysis. Series of hypotheses require empirical testing under the above framework. The data are mainly time series from international organizations such as the World Bank, the International Labor Organizations and United Nations. In addition, results from previous studies assessing educational mobility and income are used. Several statistical methods provide the grounds for the testing of the retained hypotheses. The attained results show that the effects of annual demographic growth is not established clearly for all Arab countries as most economies have had immobility in demographic population growth over the period 1960-2015 but the total population of youth in the current generation is higher than the population that prevailed for the older generation. The overall openness of the Arab economies besides their democratization measured by series of indices appear to have been stable over the period 1996-2015. Other results are related to social mobility in income, education attainment and to the unemployment trends. They all show with the progress in ICTs and the increasing reliability on social media, that the current generation has more features that are different from those of the oldest generation