Getting it right in north africa

Prior to the explosion, average annual GDP growth in the region had been humming along at 4.6 percent for a decade, with strong improvement in human development indicators.

But this growth was in some ways deceptive, for it masked problems that had long simmered beneath the surface: burgeoning unemployment, especially among the region's youth, and political repression - the issues that eventually brought things to a boil.  In Tunisia, whose revolution ignited the wildfire of change that quickly spread across the region, young people account for 70 percent of total unemployment.  The statistics are similar in Egypt and Libya.