Epstein Secrets

been virtually no change in the tax/GDP ratio over the past decade. The best performers in this respect are Latin America and the Middle East and North Africa with ratios above 30%. Several factors have been advanced to explain the poor performance in tax revenue mobilization in de- veloping countries. T

555.8 517.9 51.2 46.4 391.5 SSA 487 361.7 47.5 41.2 297.6 MENA 684.5 963.2 15.5 15.9 162.9 LAC 1130.7 1375.5 11.4 145.1 1133.5 East Asia and Pacific 1974.3 1881.7 7.8 339.8 1286.6 Central Europe and Asia 1273.9 1509.9 10.7 73.8 1095.3 South Asia 375.9 60.7 16.7 40.3 46

and mortars have been fired into Israel from the Strip in 2012. If this incoming fire were landing in Texas from Mexico—or in southern Spain from North Africa—it would be a major story. Instead, the world has largely ignored the attacks while obsessing over a possible Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear faci

toward the end of the last century and into this one, many people assumed that history moves in only one direction. The tide of freedom had lifted East Asia and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and Indonesia. In an era of global trade and communications, the rest of the world surely would follow.

ares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs — with the support and cooperation of the Unicef regional office for the Middle East and North Africa. My fellow panelist was Dalia Mogahed, a senior analyst and executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, who has tracked and analyze

eatens to be the first war between two nuclear powers. The administration focused on the EFTA00701625 problems of the past, wasting its energy on East Asia, Europe and the Middle East, and missed the obvious crisis in South Asia. Despite repeated acts of terrorism sponsored by Pakistan against India,

means what it says. Only a year after troops withdrew from Iraq, that country is not talked about in Washington, like an embarrassing relative. In North Africa, the US EFTA00683486 military has taken a back seat while the work of toppling Colonel Muammar Qaddafi and driving back the jihadists in Mali has

as was Europe's in the 1980s — and it is taking place at a vastly lower level of development than the corresponding flights in Europe and developed East Asia. "Something really big is under way — and practically no one has noticed it, even in the Arab world," argues Eberstadt. These studies are a remind

many fear, there will not be a smooth transition. If America continues to reduce its role in the Middle East, predicts a former central banker from North Africa, "the next quarter century is ... going to be very, very messy," marked by "disorder more than order." Kishore Mahbubani, a well-known theorist of

from them. In the ultimate irony, for all the apprehension it has unleashed elsewhere, the pivot has not produced an equal degree of reassurance in East Asia. There the promise and rhetoric of the pivot has been measured against tangible realities, like defense cuts that leave the U.S. Air Force scrappin