How Arab Authoritarians Are Using Citizens’ Data to Consolidate Control?

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For all their concern with stability and security, many states in the Arab world have lacked the necessary governance capacity to design and implement policies to meet the sudden wave of health, economic, security, and environmental challenges of the past decade. They have blunt instruments: repressive sticks and welfare benefits are often meted out crudely and even indiscriminately. And global shocks, especially when compounded by a still-fresh memory of popular uprisings and years of complaints about poor policy performance, have increased regime fears.

Yet there is a strong enough track record to examine new trends at work, beyond simply observing the traditional (and accurate) expectation that authoritarian regimes monitor, patrol, survey, and control their citizens. Now, changes in governance are more subtle, more profound, and sometimes less crude in their forms of repression. States are developing new tools to collect information, insert their authority into daily life, and steer behavior in ways that they have been unable to do in the past. The goals are to extract resources, target and enhance the provision of services, increase their monitoring capability of citizens’ behavior, and enhance enforcement outcomes of regulations and rules. It is not simply citizens’ political opinions but also their water usage, family structures, educational choices, and health practices that states need to know about—and steer. The challenges presented over the past decade have been strong and severe, and regimes have responded by sharpening their tools for governance. But they have not improved their tools for building consensus, consultation, or participation. That means their support is based on their strength and performance, not on their representativeness nor accountability.

Nowhere is this emerging mode of authoritarian control on sharper display than in some of the region’s most established states; we focus here on Saudi Arabia and Egypt, two of the Arab world’s most consequential states who’ve long been considered harbingers of broader regional trends. Together they constitute 31 percent of the total population of the Arab world and 43 percent of the total Arab GDP. And while both are dominated by one-person rule, a few key differences between them serve to highlight how this new trend in governance is adapted to local specificities: Saudi Arabia has fewer short-term fiscal constraints and rapidly expanding advanced technological capabilities, whereas Egypt faces much more severe fiscal burdens and is in the early phases of adopting advanced technologies.

Both countries experienced a shock to their political systems in 2011, though only one emerged unscathed. As with other Arab countries, both Cairo and Riyadh faced additional pressures after the Arab uprisings in the form of the coronavirus pandemic, fiscal burdens, and additional perceived threats to regime and public security. Along with other administratively extensive Arab states, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have met these challenges not by increasing societal trust in the state or restructuring incentives for their citizens to cooperate with state policies. Instead, they have tried to use technology and coercion to compel citizens to comply with laws and share personal information that was otherwise unavailable to regimes. In short, they are looking to increase legibility, which refers to “the breadth and depth of the state’s knowledge of its citizens and their activities.” 

Such autocratic governments certainly do not eliminate older forms of surveillance and repression, but they do not simply operate alongside of them; citizens are still imprisoned for violating policies or for organizing or speaking in ways authorities wish to suppress—but citizens are now much more closely monitored in their movements and regulated in their usage of public utilities in ways that are more mundane than traditional security concerns and heavy-handed enforcement.

While the effects of this trend—in evidence prior to 2011 in a few areas but more extensively deployed over the past decade—can be strong, they are not good or bad in and of themselves. They may bring less privacy but also more equitable tax collection; they can produce a sense of surveillance but also of state effectiveness. And they must be examined as part of a long-term global trend in governance.

But if the trend is global, countries will achieve different levels of effectiveness: Saudi Arabia has rolled out more ways of tracking citizen behavior, done so more effectively, and proceeded more quickly than Egypt has. The point is not that Egypt is a failure but that states will proceed at different paces, and sometimes their ambitions will exceed their abilities. But any international interlocutor—a global health specialist worried about disease transmission, a representative of an international financial institution listening to pledges about tax collection rates, or an investor being invited to participate in the construction of a new concept in urban living—will be presented with a shifting landscape.

But one aspect of the trend toward legibility is constant: it is not coupled with citizen empowerment to monitor rulers. Indeed, these new tools do not help cultivate trust between the rulers and the ruled; instead, they cope with its absence by making compliance easier to monitor and less clumsy to enforce. The new enforcement tools have inserted themselves very effectively in daily life, but there is much less evidence that they give political authorities what they need to cope with governance challenges. Emerging governance patterns not only have some negative normative implications in terms of authoritarianism but also are betraying some already-visible signs of profound policy mistakes—mistakes that would not have been possible if rulers had been restricted to the older, blunter tools for monitoring compliance.

Clumsy Administrative States Under Challenge

Beginning in the nineteenth century in Egypt and the twentieth in Saudi Arabia, impressive administrative apparatuses were built that not only controlled public space and security but also oversaw many social services, shaped markets, counted citizens, and recorded basic information about them. The administrative apparatus rendered groups and individual citizens legible to state officials, making it possible to design new policies for everything from foodstuffs to private speech to consumption. But the tools could be crude, indiscriminate, inefficient, and prone to corruption—their effects included widespread arrests; untargeted subsidies; labyrinthine procedures requiring papers, forms, and official stamps; bureaucratic fiefdoms; and loopholes (such as informality, bribes, or favoritism through connections) that led to tremendous leakage.

In both countries, administrative capacity tended to be most developed when it served specific purposes, such as the provision of social services or regime security (leading to a heavy reliance on surveillance, policing, intelligence gathering, and focusing on the Ministries of Interior and the large and overlapping security services). Indeed, the reliance on various forms of rent allowed states to open access to housing, schooling, healthcare, and basic consumer goods.

This was obviously the case in Saudi Arabia, where the state apparatus knit a diverse society in areas such as labor, energy, transportation, and agriculture, first around Aramco and the oil industry. Saudi resultant oil revenues, especially after the 1973 oil boom, made possible the generous provision of services, including free healthcare, free education, jobs, and subsidized energy, water, and electricity. The regime heavily controlled almost all aspects of formal public life but only loosely monitored a rich set of informal and private structures for groups, families, and tribes.

In Egypt, despite its poorer resources, social services were also a major focus of state activity. Since World War II, the supply of basic commodities in urban areas has not simply been an economic concern but also one of public order and security. In subsequent decades, the Egyptian state expanded its social safety net widely (if sometimes shallowly) by building schools, universities, public housing, and public health facilities; creating jobs; and subsidizing basic commodities.

Both policy areas, regime security and the provision of social services, have run into problems in recent years. With regard to regime security, the uprisings of 2011 overwhelmed some regimes and frightened all of them. And with regard to the provision of social services, each country has experienced its own distinct but long-brewing crisis; Egypt and Saudi Arabia both find themselves fiscally strapped but often lack the administrative capacity or political will to pull back or target allocations. In both states, the new governments are increasingly shifting their image from providing for consumption (and targeting what they do provide much more carefully) to encouraging production and attracting investment.

This requires not merely policing public speech and potential opposition but gathering finely grained information, affecting individual behavior, and steering economic activity at the level of individuals. Informality threatens these needs as states need cooperative, not just compliant, behavior. They need legible societies, not just quiescent ones.

Rendering Consumption Legible

Starting from the late 1970s in Egypt and late 1980s in Saudi Arabia, subsidy programs came to be seen by rulers as unsustainable, expensive, and inefficient. The fact that both governments lacked the necessary information about the income and consumption behavior of their population led them first to supply-side changes that did not necessarily require knowledge of citizens’ consumption behavior: raising the price of subsidized items, downsizing the number of eligible people, and changing the size and quality of the subsidized items themselves.

However, the slow adoption of new technologies for governance purposes starting in the early 2000s allowed both governments to expand their institutional capacities and render their population more legible. Thus, starting in 2014, both Saudi Arabia and Egypt radically restructured subsidies.

Saudi Citizen Accounts

The changes in governance are most visible at the most mundane level imaginable: how do citizens pay their bills?

Since the 1960s, Saudi Arabia has provided electricity, water, and gasoline at subsidized prices to all inhabitants regardless of their nationality and income level. In 2015, the difference between the subsidized price and the market price reached 300 billion riyals (about $80 billion) and accounted for 80 percent of the overall subsidies in the kingdom. Only 30 percent of the benefits of these subsidies went to the lowest 40 percent of households by income.

In 2016, the government announced its Fiscal Balance Program (now the Fiscal Sustainability Program) which included a plan to discontinue these subsidies. The purpose of this change was to save around 209 billion riyals (about $55 billion) per year by 2020 and incentivize consumption reduction. The change left a huge impact on the population (see table 1).

To mitigate this impact, the government launched a new cash transfer program called the Citizen Account where eligible citizens receive periodic payments. To successfully implement this program, the government needed to overcome two gaps of legibility: it did not yet have the billing and price monitoring capabilities nor did it have the information to identify those qualified for direct payments.

On prices, the existing system for gasoline was for Aramco to sell it to local gas stations to resell to end consumers after adding a fixed profit margin. But it was beyond the government’s capacity to monitor pump prices, especially because the price charged to retailers fluctuated. For electricity and water, consumers were charged based on human readings of electromechanical and mechanical meters linked to each household—a system prone to manipulation and human error. And in most apartment buildings, there was only one meter, making it difficult for the government to know and bill the consumption of each apartment separately from the others.

To address these challenges, the government relied on a combination of new legal, technological, and punitive measures that required interagency coordination and public-private harmonization. To ensure gas stations’ strict implementation of the periodic change of gasoline prices, the Ministry of Commerce frequently sent inspection teams to monitor, report, and fine violations—but also utilized Tabligh Tijari, a mobile app released in 2013, to ask citizens to report violations. The Saudi Electricity Company introduced smart, fully automated meters resistant to tampering. The National Water Company did the same.

Technology was also the main tool for solving the challenge of collecting and verifying citizens’ financial information. The government opened an online platform electronically linked to the technological infrastructure that the Ministry of Interior had been building since 2009, beginning with a new identification card system. To issue a new identification card, the ten fingerprints of each citizen were required in addition to their photo image. In April 2011, the General Directorate of Passports launched a new online service called Absher to switch its services online. Slowly, Absher’s services expanded to include other ministry sectors such as traffic and civil affairs. By 2015, Absher’s username and password were universalized, and all other government entities used them to verify the identity of the user and provide services to them. Building on this decade-long digital transformation, the Citizen Account was able to use the same Absher username and password to verify the identity of its users. In terms of user income, the Citizen Account requires each applicant to grant the program the right to verify every reported piece of information, including by providing access to bank accounts.

New Food Subsidy System in Egypt

In Egypt, legibility has increased more slowly and fitfully—but it has unmistakably come. Electricity and water bills matter, but as in so much of Egyptian politics, bread matters most.

Before 2014, three-fourths of Egypt’s subsidy spending went to the commodities category (including fuel, food, electricity, and water), with the lion’s share going to fuel and food. The Egyptian food subsidy system (FSS) started as an emergency measure during World War II, but it was repurposed and expanded after the war to be a universal safety net for all Egyptians. By 1975, around 17 percent of Egyptian government spending went to the FSS.

The system was not only expensive but leaky. Corruption, weak monitoring capacities, and an underdeveloped supply chain were rampant. And poor monitoring allowed a sizable segment of bakeries to resell subsidized wheat in the black market rather than baking and selling it to customers as intended (sometimes obscuring this by baking smaller loaves and selling the excess). Poor storage and warehousing conditions for domestic wheat compounded the problem, and there was little incentive to monitor waste.

CAIRO, EGYPT-MAY 8: A man buys subsided Egyptian traditional 'Baladi' bread using the smart-card bread subsidy system from a governmental bread stand in Sayeda Zeinab Neighborhood on May 8, 2022 in Cairo, Egypt. Last month, Egypt introduced price controls on commercially sold bread in response to the rising price of wheat. Egypt imports 80% of its wheat supply from Russia and Ukraine, whose production and export have been disrupted by the invasion. (Photo by Roger Anis/GettyImages)

But when the government tried to raise the price of some of the subsidized food items in January 1977, protests erupted throughout Egypt, forcing the government to reverse its decision. It moved to more gradual and indirect strategies still aimed crudely at supply rather than working to target or eliminate inefficiency. It increased the price of bread in 1983 and 1987—leading to tensions but no unrest. But it also tinkered with the size, quality, and supply of subsidized items and even removed them from some varieties of bread. And it decreased the number of ration cardholders through suspending the registration of newborns and removing the deceased and those who were abroad. By 2000, the number of cardholders was reduced from 99 percent of the population to 70 percent. The government also moved to adopt a system that privileged the needy, but it lacked the information to make a color-coded ration card system viable. Overall, as the below table shows, by 2014 the Egyptian government was able to lower the amount spent on the FSS to 4.3 percent of overall spending (see table 2).

In 2014, Egypt adopted a radical restructuring plan for the FSS. Instead of selling wheat to bakeries at subsidized prices, the new system required bakeries to buy the wheat at its market price and sell it to customers at the subsidized price, with the government paying the difference based on loaves sold—undercutting the black market and incentivizing bakeries to attract customers with the quality of their bread.

The new system was based on an intrusive innovation: a 2006 initiative that replaced the old paper ration cards with smart ones. The government had partnered with the private sector to equip every grocery store with an electronic point of sale (POS) and build the technological network that links all of these POSs with the government. In 2014, to monitor loaves sold, the government expanded this system to include bakeries. It equipped every bakery with an electronic POS and required eligible individuals to use their ration card, automatically monitoring every transaction. And converting into electronic transactions allowed a second innovation: each eligible ration card user was allowed five loaves of bread every day. For those who did not use their full quota, their ration cards transferred the subsidies to other goods, encouraging people not to waste or resell what they bought.

Formalizing Informal Markets

Water and bread have not been the only places where the trend to build legibility is in evidence. In functioning states in the Arab world, rulers have found themselves controlling governments with powerful presences in their societies but that are unable to cope with a host of practices that make individual and local behavior accessible. The most far-reaching attempts to overcome the illegibility of social practices may be taking place at present in Egypt and Saudi Arabia in ways that rarely attract international or media attention. But every Egyptian or Saudi senses governance changing when they are fined when photographed not wearing a seatbelt, are directed by a mobile phone company to register or verify the link to their national identification, or find passport renewal, driver licenses, and other similar services electronically suspended because they owe fees or fines.

What had remained off the books is increasingly recorded not on paper but in electronic form—in a manner that can be monitored, regulated, and patrolled by various state authorities. Even informal practices, generally defined as practices beyond the reach of the state, are being brought within the state’s administrative grasp—once again a bit more fitfully and slowly in Egypt than in Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, the process focuses on economic enterprises; in Egypt, the focus has been on transactions among citizens. In both cases, new techniques have been developed to ensure that when a business operates or money changes hands, the state can see.

Pulling Back the Curtains on the Saudi Informal Market

The Saudi informal private market is dominated by a phenomenon called tasattur (business concealment) in which a Saudi citizen allows a foreigner to run a business under their name in return for a fixed amount of income. In 2019, the Saudi Ministry of Commerce estimated the size of this market at 300–400 billion riyals ($80–107 billion) and the percentage of concealment in some sectors, such as grocery stores and barbershops, at nearly 100 percent.

The tasattur market was a product of two intertwined labor systems. First, the Saudi labor market is segregated: As of 2021, 3.1 million of the 9.8 million workers in Saudi Arabia were citizens, but 1.2 million of them worked in the public sector, which comprised 96.3 percent of the workforce. On the other hand, non-Saudi workers comprised 77.4 percent of the workforce in the private sector.

The second system is the kafala system in which non-Saudi workers are governed by a separate set of legal rules and administrative practices that tie them to specific employers who serve as their “sponsor”—limiting labor rights and mobility. An unintentional effect has been that some Saudis avoid actually starting and running a business (and using sponsored labor) but instead hand management to sponsored labor, merely lending their name to the business and collecting a fixed income from the sponsored. The foreigner is not allowed to start and run this business or replace his sponsor. The sponsor may withdraw sponsorship—likely causing deportation—and is disincentivized not by law but only by the need to find an alternative. These arrangements led to the emergence of a large, interconnected informal market that is neither legible nor regulated.

In 2015, the government announced a comprehensive National Transformation Program. It included an initiative dedicated to combating tasattur. It brought ten government agencies to collaborate in rewriting laws, increasing costs associated with tasattur, and, most innovatively, enhancing technological surveillance and tracking.

Indeed, it was increasing legibility through technology that marked the real innovation. In December 2021, the Zakat, Tax, and Customs Authority launched an electronic invoicing initiative where all businesses in Saudi Arabia are required to record their financial transactions in an electronic invoicing system. Starting in January 2023, those transactions were electronically linked to the general authority’s system, allowing the government to track, analyze, and surveil all the financial transactions—and likely detect tasattur businesses easier. Another anti-tasattur program, a six-phase, fourteen-month plan to discourage cash transactions, started in July 2019 and requires businesses to install electronic point-of-service (POS) equipment. This initiative increased the amount of POS equipment from 303,464 in 2017 to 1,013,141 in 2021, and the number of POS transactions increased from 708,000 in 2017 to 5 million in 2021.

These initiatives complement a third initiative called the Wages Protection System, which has been in place since 2014. This program requires business establishments to open bank accounts to all of its employees and pay them their wages electronically in a way that is legible and monitored by government agencies. It started with large establishments, and through a six-year gradual process it began to include smaller ones. In July 2020, the minister of human resources announced the launch of a new digital platform called Mudad that allows small and medium-sized businesses to manage their payroll and comply with the Wages Protection System.

Electronic Transactions and Monitoring in Egypt

Like Saudi Arabia, much of Egypt’s economic activity takes place in an informal manner. It is not that the state is absent from the economy—far from it. But many economic transactions take place in cash and in a manner that makes monitoring and compliance difficult. Official regulation has coped with this in two ways, both of them a bit crude in their operation and effects.

First, state bodies regulate what they can, sometimes through what might seem like a presumption of noncompliance. Egyptians have become accustomed to requirements to show documentation with appropriate signatures, seals, and stamps to prove that they have paid a fee, followed a procedure, fulfilled qualifications, or attained a credential. Even entry into some public buildings requires presentation of an official identification card; application for public employment must be accompanied not merely with proof of degree but also one bearing an official stamp.

Second, officials can be induced to look the other way for those who wish to avoid such steps, either through resignation, lack of capacity, or corruption. Construction can take place on land with an uncertain title; workers can be employed off the books; an electricity meter reader can be manipulated to record a low usage number. The result is not merely burdensome but inefficient, demoralizing, and stultifying.

And, as in Saudi Arabia, economic activity is being slowly reassembled on an electronic basis. For a quotidian example, Egyptian electricity bills are now prepaid online, so that those who do not comply in time are rendered quite literally powerless.

In 2019 a law was issued that gently described itself as “organizing” noncash payments. It actually required them for transactions involving state bodies and most major transactions for private entities. And in 2022, the state moved more assertively to regulate the private fintech sector. It has also made plans to tax e-commerce. The effect is not merely to regulate but offer opportunities, since provision of electronic and technological services to state bodies is a lucrative opportunity for private business.

All kinds of routine transactions—updating an address, paying a fee or fine, or completing any bureaucratic interaction—can be (and is often required to be) electronic in nature. The Ministry of Interior appears to most citizens today not merely as the enforcer of regime, state, and public security but also as a vanguard organization in the march toward electronic government.

There are three features of such a conversion from paper and informality to electronic transactions. First, compliance itself is relatively painless or at most annoying—and it is also advisable. In 2015, the Minister of Interior negotiated with MasterCard to link all national identification cards to an electronic payment system; mobile telephone users have reported being required to re-register their numbers to connect them to their national identification (and indeed, such a step is now required for all new mobile numbers). In 2022, the age for mandating a national identification card was lowered to fifteen (from sixteen), and over the same period, the minister of interior made many routine procedural steps (including securing a national identification card) available online.

Second, the conversion makes it more difficult to evade compliance and monitoring. When transactions are electronic and impersonal, rather than on paper and face-to-face, there is much less room for slippage, evasion, omission, mistakes, and, of course, forgery and bribery. Many citizens seem to continue to prefer cash transactions in many settings, perhaps out of a legacy of mistrust. Anecdotal evidence, for instance, suggests that most Uber passengers pay in cash rather than electronically. But the fact that an electronic option is available and a legal and regulatory framework now exists for ridesharing services suggests that the chaotic informality of Egypt’s taxi system a couple decades ago is slowly on the way out.

Third, because information is now available in electronic form, it is easy to collect, share, analyze, monitor, and move. And this last feature makes governance feel quite different. On the one hand, there are undeniable benefits. Ordinary citizens no longer have to take an afternoon off and trudge from one window to another paying petty fees, collecting stamps, and submitting papers. And investors have been promised construction of a “golden ticket” system to render compliance with regulations and obtaining permissions simple and swift.

But the system also can tighten compliance. Salaries paid through banks can be taxed far more easily and reliably. Importers can be required to operate through the formal banking system, where they can be required to show the legitimacy of their foreign currency holdings—an additional step that has led to complaints about delays, especially at times (most notably over the past year) when finance officials were seeking to control the flow of dollars due to a liquidity crisis caused by the necessity to service massive international debts.

Over the long term, the effect seems to be offering new policy tools and options, not merely to monitor citizens on security grounds but also to steer economic policy and manage public finances. And it is making possible a restructuring of the state’s operations in important areas: Monitoring and reporting for the taxation system was overhauled in 2020. The value-added tax (VAT) received similar attention in 2022. Senior officials now generally speak of addressing Egypt’s fiscal needs not by raising taxes but by monitoring and enforcing compliance more effectively—and thus more fairly. A recent overhaul of the health insurance sector also was presented in terms of streamlining, filling gaps, and increasing efficiency.

Real estate poses the most complex problem, as Egypt’s long-standing system for registering property and assessing value is full of loopholes and evasions. Any attempt to reform it will be costly to many—and indeed, Egypt’s normally compliant Parliament balked at a government attempt to enforce a tax on real estate transactions early in 2022.

A Rocky Start: Deploying New Techniques in a Hurry

The techniques being rolled out in Saudi Arabia and Egypt are subtle enough to escape much political analysis, but their effects are felt daily.

The initial signals are mixed: the COVID-19 pandemic forced states to adjust in a hurry. Both countries rushed the tools they had developed into action, but Saudi Arabia had simply gone much farther in being able to monitor individual behavior. For leaders in both countries, the lesson was not that increasing legibility was ineffectual; instead, the lesson was that it had not proceeded fast enough. But Egypt’s greater level of fiscal burden and lesser amount of resources have meant that it is still scrambling, relying more on diplomacy and taking on debt than on managing its economy and society more effectively.

Concerns about plagues, pilgrimage, and international travel were powerful factors in shaping political systems in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And in both cases, the provision of public health became a major burden assumed by states, especially in the second half of the twentieth century—however unevenly the burden was met. So, both states have a long institutional history related to public health, particularly in the area of infectious disease. But the recent changes left them in different positions to respond when hit with the rapid emergence of the coronavirus pandemic.

Saudi Arabia had a very recent experience with Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV), a global health challenge that arose and was concentrated in the country—leading it to build up systems for monitoring and responding quickly to outbreaks. The Saudi state had recently built a host of surveillance systems and greatly centralized decisionmaking in the hands of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who had just undertaken several initiatives to dismantle large ministries and increase mid-level communication and coordination.

Egypt’s most recent outbreak experience, by contrast, was with hepatitis C. (The outbreak itself seems to have been caused by an earlier attempt to eradicate bilharzia by mass inoculation—re-used needles may have caused the new challenge). The official response to hepatitis focused on testing and treatment. But just as the government was declaring victory, the coronavirus hit, leaving the authorities with a set of public health tools that focused on disease eradication rather than prevention or monitoring. To address the new threat, the government certainly did increase surveillance: after being caught flat-footed in the 2011 uprising, security services had learned quickly how to monitor social media and cell phones. But despite the COVID-19-related public health messaging, the focus seemed almost exclusively on repressing opposition and preventing popular mobilization rather than combating contagion.

The contrast showed. Both countries worked quickly to decree various closures of public spaces, but Saudi Arabia had a variety of tools to enforce and patrol closures and distancing; Egyptian enforcement tended to break down after a short period. Both countries could distribute vaccines when they became available, but Egypt all but abandoned attempts to track the disease and enforce changes in behavior after a few months.

The pandemic suggested that the most pressing questions for governance now are not how to defend against military threats but how to manage public space more generally, deal with economic dislocation, and build governance systems that can expect the unexpected. Such changes are not simply a matter of repurposing old structures but building new ones—or more precisely, building mechanisms that allow officials to insert state authority into everyday life, involving routine actions and transactions. Again, Saudi Arabia is a step ahead with greater resources and a society that is already operating, even in informal ways, in a manner amenable to state penetration. But Egypt is following closely behind in inventing ways to render compliance virtually automatic and involuntary through electronic means.

One-Way Legibility: We Know About You but You Don’t Know About Us

New governance techniques are working slowly and unevenly, but they are progressing to increase state capacity for ensuring monitoring and compliance. However, they are laid on top of—and do not address—a fundamentally autocratic order. And that can lead to severe problems and even disastrous outcomes.

Old patterns of governance were based in part on meeting perceived needs of the regime and state security—and when they were focused on economics, regime and state security were always part of the equation. That has not changed. But what has changed is where the threats to security come from: microbes, global supply chains, climate change, and distant human decisions and projects (like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, and the fracking revolution) that cause real or unexpected challenges. States throughout the world have already found themselves scrambling to repurpose old tools or invent new ones. In Egypt and Saudi Arabia, these tools fall under the broad umbrella of legibility, which is rarely named as such but is felt every day by residents of both societies as their small-scale interactions come under state gaze.

The past few years suggest that increasing legibility does offer regimes more effective tools for implementing policy, but it does not address structural problems and exposures. Egypt’s moves toward targeted subsidies and monitoring economic activity can allow its rulers to impose taxes, counteract some inefficiencies, and enhance compliance—but they still find themselves scrambling to manage debt, attract investors, and meet the public’s basic needs. They have targeted consumption and may rapidly improve tax collection, but the scope of their fiscal needs and existing debt still leaves them very dependent on deep-pocketed international friends. Such dependence means turning to the International Monetary Fund, exhausting the patience of friends, and allowing fiscal needs to drive foreign policy. Increased legibility will likely help Egypt meet the commitments it makes to its financial supporters, but it cannot make those commitments less onerous. Saudi Arabia, with its greater resources, can escape some of Egypt’s burdens. And again, it can devise new policies and implement old ones to ensure greater compliance, but the country still must cope with the long-term challenges of managing what is still a petroeconomy in a turbulent market and security environment.

Furthermore, states are not reciprocating the turn toward legibility; they are not providing increased visibility for citizens into state functions. Increased legibility works one way. And if there is an Achilles’ heel in this construction of legible societies, it is this. Of course, governance is not completely opaque. Official websites provide a more accessible source for most prosaic information—like regulations, performance, and statistics—than was available in the past. And there is a publicly viewable legislative process in both countries that is generally—but not always—invoked when concrete legal changes are required.

But much remains behind state curtains. And three interlinked matters stand out in this regard. First, security bodies—and even their budgets and economic activity—remain beyond public scrutiny and even beyond the bounds of permissible public discussion. Second, critical policy directions are decided by the leader of the regime with no clear decisionmaking process. Events in Yemen or Egyptian exchange rates are widely discussed, but momentous steps are taken without any clarity about who was consulted and how. Third, both regimes have undertaken megaprojects such as entirely new cities, including the smart city NEOM in Saudi Arabia and the new administrative capital in Egypt. While the projects themselves serve as major showcases, almost all aspects remain unknown save for breathless official pronouncements, videos, brochures, and websites. Indeed, most of the projects associated with the government’s capital—such as Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund or Egypt’s less ambitious Tahya Misr and Sovereign Fund—remain effectively outside of official budgetmaking processes and oversight and are closely and personally identified not merely with the regime but with the ruler.

Yet if the governments’ inner workings are invisible, the implications for citizens and state finances will not be. And there is a worrying historical analogy that carries warning signs.

A century and a half ago, there was a very similar pattern of rulers who greatly expanded state services, capacity, and market involvement but did so in a highly autocratic fashion that mixed ruler self-interest with social benefits and led to unmonitored fiscal commitments and recklessness in some areas. The results set off a string of fiscal, political, and international crises in the Ottoman Empire, Tunisia, Egypt, and Iran as states found themselves unable to meet their payment obligations on debts that had been incurred to finance ambitious development and infrastructure projects, a considerable portion of which lay in the hands of the individual rulers or narrow groups around them.

Today, pandemic and war have set imposing challenges for regional governments, and those with fewer resources—like Egypt—have been placed under enormous strains. But leaders who hold those challenges responsible for economic crises are missing part of the point. Yes, climate change is a new challenge; pandemic is an older one, although the coronavirus outbreak came in a more dramatic and sudden way than its predecessors in previous centuries. But if the sources of stress are daunting, the new techniques of governance allow for more precise and subtle responses. The new tools for governance were unimaginable in earlier decades, but they cannot deliver one commodity that rarely emerges in economic analyses: wisdom. The decision to embark on a massive program of infrastructural development has already transformed physical landscapes, but it has done so in a way that will deeply affect future generations. With its financial buffer, Saudi Arabia may be able to make more mistakes than Egypt, where the pattern of decisionmaking has led the country into one of its worst economic crises.

In Egypt today, a majority of the state budget is devoted to debt repayment—and borrowing finances just under half of the annual budget. In Saudi Arabia, oil revenues put it in a relatively better position, but still the debt-to-GDP ratio has increased from 5.8 percent in 2015 to 30 percent in 2021. Both proportions are growing. The situation is not inherently unsustainable, but it does appear to expose the governance systems in both countries to real domestic risks (such as insolvency, political unrest stemming from possible austerity measures, suspicions of corruption, and the reality of unaccountability) that could be aggravated by international risks (such as a reliance on donors and creditors and internationally imposed austerity).

Residents of the region report alarming levels of food insecurity and clearly feel the existing regimes do not meet their needs. When citizens are accountable to rulers but rulers remain opaque, governance can be effective over the short term while leaving the longer term hazy indeed.