Ferid Belhaj: "The World is Changing Very Quickly, and Tunisia Can No Longer Think About its Future with the Intellectual Tools of the 1980s"
Each Tunisian engineer who leaves the country increases the productivity of a foreign country. This is how Ferid Belhaj, an economist of international reputation, posed the question of human capital to the participants of the 27th edition of the L'Économiste Maghrébin forum, held on May 21, 2026, in Tunis. Speaking from Washington under the theme "Tunisia: 70 Years of Independence, the Time for a New Course, the Time for Choices," he articulated a reading of national sovereignty around four inseparable dimensions: human, food, financial, energy, and technological.
What will Tunisia be like on the eve of its centenary, in 2056? This is the fundamental question that Belhaj posed as a recurring theme throughout his intervention, leaving the answer to the collective responsibility of the present. The path to getting there, according to him, begins with an observation about the state of the world: crises no longer follow one another, they coexist. The economist refers to this phenomenon as a "polycrisis," an unprecedented configuration where economic, climate, energy, technological, and geopolitical fragilities feed into each other. The pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine, disruptions on global maritime routes, the rise of artificial intelligence: all these shocks have, according to him, exposed the limits of the Tunisian model inherited from past decades. "The world is changing very quickly, and Tunisia can no longer think about its future with the intellectual tools of the 1980s," he said.
Two pillars were the subject of particularly detailed treatment. On the financial front, Belhaj used numerical data and comparisons between countries to shed light on a mechanism rarely discussed in public: the way the behavior of the Tunisian banking sector hinders productive investment. On the agricultural and water front, he identified water resources as a central variable in national food resilience in the long term.
However, it was the question of skills that gave his proposal its most immediate impact. Tunisia produces highly qualified profiles, engineers, doctors, developers, whose value is recognized far beyond its borders. Yet, the unemployment rate among young graduates reaches worrying levels, while the flow of emigration of these same profiles continues to amplify. For Belhaj, the equation is simple and severe: "Training without offering prospects is financing the competitiveness of others." He derives a direct implication for public policy: investing in fields like artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, or energy is not just an educational strategy, it is an act of sovereignty, or its renunciation.
The geostrategic aspect completes this picture with a thesis on the recomposition of energy balances. Without having the fossil resources of its neighbors, Tunisia nevertheless occupies a unique position: a crossroads between Europe, Africa, and the Mediterranean, at the heart of east-west logistical and energy corridors. Belhaj sees this as an under-exploited lever, provided there is a coherent political will. His reading: the energy power of the 21st century is played out less on deposits than on the mastery of networks. The developments he devotes to the Strait of Sicily and future infrastructure are part of this logic.
