Khaberni - Hazem Rahahleh, Chairman of the National Electric Power Company and General Manager of the Jordan Chamber of Industry, announced the release of a joint research paper with Dr. Omar Razzaz titled “The Retreat of Neoliberalism: Lessons and Derived Policies,” according to Rahahleh's post on his Facebook page.
Rahahleh said that he was honored to collaborate with Razzaz in preparing the paper, which highlights the deep structural changes occurring in the global economy and the gradual withdrawal from “the neoliberal order” that had been established since the early 1980s.
According to the paper, neoliberalism promoted the slogan of reducing the state's role and liberalizing markets, leaving supply and demand mechanisms to direct economic development. However, its practical applications have resulted in structural imbalances, including rising inequality, the erosion of the middle class, growing monopolies, and increased vulnerability to financial, health, and geopolitical crises.
The paper pointed out that the successive crises, from the global financial crisis of 2008 to the COVID-19 pandemic, exposed the limits of absolute reliance on the market, with the state returning to play a decisive role in protecting the economy.
It emphasized that the re-emergence of the state does not mean a return to central planning but rather adopting a more balanced model based on active industrial policies, public investments in technology, energy, and digitalization, interventions to protect supply chains, and regulatory tools to combat monopolies, thus redirecting markets without abolishing them.
The paper concluded with a pivotal question: The question is no longer whether the state should intervene, but how it should intervene, and for whose benefit?
