Mass Social Unrest In Bolivia, Hong Kong, France, Spain, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt And Elsewhere

The 3 Things Behind Mass Social Unrest In Bolivia, Hong Kong, France, Spain, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, And Elsewhere

by Nick Colas

Social unrest seems to be cropping up all over the world, from Hong Kong to Bolivia and Lebanon; we offer up a 3 variable model to help explain why. The inputs: urbanization, income inequality, and average age. Every country currently seeing mass protests has some combination of high levels of the first two and lower readings for the last. This admitted crude measure also explains why many developed countries’ political environments also seem so fraught at the moment.

Since there seems to be an outbreak of global protest at the moment, these are the subject of this week’s Story Time Thursday. A partial list of the countries in question:

• Bolivia
• Chile
• Ecuador
• Haiti
• Hong Kong
• Lebanon

Much of the news commentary around these events centers on country-specific issues, but I see 3 threads that weave through most or all of them: urbanization, income inequality and average age. Perhaps that’s just my own worldview that “people are the same everywhere”, but let’s see how far it takes us in explaining current events.

Here is the percent of each country that lives in/around cities using World Bank urbanization data:

• Bolivia: 69%
• Chile: 88%
• Ecuador: 64%
• Haiti: 55%
• Hong Kong: 100%
• Lebanon: 89%
• All are well above the global urbanization rate of 55%.

And here is the Gini coefficient by country from the CIA World Factbook (the higher the number, the greater the income inequality):

• Bolivia: 47.0
• Chile: 50.5
• Ecuador: 45.9
• Haiti: 60.8
• Hong Kong: 53.9
• Lebanon: 31.8
• Most are above the global median Gini coefficient of 37.9, and I can tell you that Beirut is as unequal as any western city so perhaps Lebanon’s official number is incorrect.

Finally, here is the average age of each country, also from CIA data:

• Bolivia: 24.6 years
• Chile: 34.8
• Ecuador: 28.1
• Haiti: 23.3
• Hong Kong: 44.8
• Lebanon: 30.5
• The majority are at or below the global median age by country of 31.0.

The logic behind why these measures indicate a potential for unrest:

• Urbanization rates quantify the concentration of citizens in urban areas and how easily they might gather for protests. They are also essentially a proxy for the “network effect” of people’s ability to connect with each other face to face.
• Income inequality makes it more likely for a population to protest against what they see as a ruling elite.
• As for average age, history shows younger people are more likely to take to the streets.