Tarik M. Yousef
Senior Fellow and Director
Bio
Tarik M. Yousef is a senior fellow and director of the Middle East Council on Global Affairs. Prior, he served as senior fellow and director of the Brookings Doha Center and was a nonresident senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. He is a research fellow with the Economic Research Forum in Cairo.
His career has spanned the academic and think tank world at the School of Foreign Service of Georgetown University, the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings. His involvement with public policy includes working in the Middle East Department at the International Monetary Fund, the Middle East and North Africa region at the World Bank, and the UN Millennium Project.
He has contributed more than 75 articles, chapters, and reports, and co-edited several volumes including most recently “The Belt and Road Initiative: China-Middle East Cooperation in an Age of Geopolitical Turbulence” (Brookings Doha Center and the Shanghai Academy for Social Sciences, 2019); “Public Sector Reform in the Middle East and North Africa: Lessons of Experience for a Region in Transition” (Brookings Press, 2020); and “The Gulf Cooperation Council at Forty: Risk & Opportunity in a Changing World” (Brookings Press, 2021).
Yousef has served on the boards of the Middle East Economics Association; United Nations Development Programme Human Development Reports; Arab Human Development Report; Arab Knowledge Report; Gender Economic Research and Policy Analysis in the Arab World; The Social and Economic Survey Research Institute; the Global Agenda Councils of the World Economic Forum; and the Arab Banking Corporation.
contact fellowResearch Areas
- Global economy
- Political economy
- Governance
- Geopolitics
Countries of Focus
- GCC
- North Africa
- Mashreq
- Libya
Other Areas of Interest
- Policy reform
- Political transitions
- Banking and finance
- Public policy
Education
- Ph.D., Economics, Harvard University, 1996.
- B.A., Economics, University of Oregon, 1990.
Articles
Omar H. Rahman, Tarik M. Yousef, Nader S. Kabbani, Dalia Ghanem, Adel Abdel Ghafar
Rabah Arezki, Tarik M. Yousef
Ahmed Morsy, Mouin Rabbani, Tarik M. Yousef, Nader S. Kabbani, Paul Dyer, Aisha Al-Sarihi, Galip Dalay, Ranj Alaaldin, Robert P. Beschel Jr., Justin Dargin , Faozi Al-Goidi, Alhala Alkuwari, Abdalftah Hamed Ali, Mahjoob Zweiri, Yahia H. Zoubir
Omar H. Rahman, Nadim Houry, Joseph Bahout, Hamidreza Azizi, Tarik M. Yousef, Abdulaziz Sager, Dania Thafer, Mohammad Abu Rumman, Hasan Jaber
Hamidreza Azizi, Beverley Milton Edwards, Omar H. Rahman, Tarik M. Yousef, Adel Abdel Ghafar, Mohammad Abu Hawash, Jin Liangxiang
Publications
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The Trump Administration began the morning of February 3, 2025, by telling staff and contractors of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to stay home. Elon Musk and his team at the newly minted Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) spent the day digging through staff computers, digital records, and accounts seeking information on programs they felt were wasteful or not aligned with the new administration’s priorities.
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We present the climate policy uncertainty tracker (CPUT). Developed using news media analysis, this index serves as a barometer for measuring the uncertainty surrounding climate policies.
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The institution of the military is experiencing a resurgence around the globe. Citizens are placing higher levels of trust in the armed forces—even in regions with a history of military interference or domination. In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, where military elites hold a great deal of political and economic power, around 70% of surveyed citizens in 2021-2022 expressed significant trust in the armed forces. This surpasses the levels of trust accorded to elected officials, civil society, and the news media.
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