Rédaction Africa Links 24 with satarbf
Published on 2024-03-19 13:32:37
During this month of Ramadan, Tunisians spend a lot of their time queuing and waiting their turn, access to basic food products is no longer as smooth and automatic.
Several of my friends tell me that they spend on average 2 to 3 hours per day in lines, to buy bread, get a package of couscous, or access a kilogram of sugar, or a liter of olive oil. A time that is not worked, a time full of annoyances and tensions with those also in line, but who always try to cut in line and go ahead of others, by pretending anything and everything.
A rationing mechanism
In Tunisia, in recent years, waiting in line has become a governance lever and a tool for food rationing and scarcity management.
A rationing described by economic theory, with micro-economic applications specifically dedicated to waiting in line.
Lines in all cities, all villages, and at any time of the day.
Sometimes, you have to arrive before sunrise to be sure to have access to the products affected by scarcity. Other times, you come with your children to increase your chances of getting more bread, or kilograms of sugar than allowed.
And this systematized rationing costs time for Tunisians, waiting in line at the bakery, then in line for sugar, and then in line for oil, it takes a lot of time and hours stolen from work time, from production time. In a snowball effect, waiting lines create more waiting lines.
By being present in the bakery line, the employee of the Steg is not at his desk, and by his absence, he indirectly creates another waiting line for citizens who want to pay their electricity bill. He waits in front of a counter where 3 out of 5 employees are elsewhere, waiting in line.
In some cases, as in Tunisia, the waiting line system may require a strong police presence, with high-ranking officers who instead of carrying out law enforcement activities in the city, are diverted to businesses and grocery stores, to maintain order in the waiting line, instead of doing other things (traffic management, administrative document preparation, investigation, etc.).
The waiting line theory
In economics, waiting in line has given rise to a theory and econometric applications on crowd behavior, market dysfunction, and the perversions associated with the time wasted in these queues.
Instead of allowing the market to set prices through the interplay of supply and demand, government authorities cap the price of a product X, let’s say a baguette or a kilogram of sugar. Capping the price means prohibiting the sale of bread above this cap price (not to be confused with the floor price).
It is understood that if the mechanisms of supply and demand were allowed to operate, the equilibrium price would be higher, at least three times higher, in the case of the price of a baguette in Tunisia.
With a competitive price (truthful prices), the baker can cover his production costs and the consumer can adjust his demand according to his preferences and purchasing power.
Assuming that bakers and consumers can access the products concerned without speculation or external obstacles to their will, the market does things correctly, thanks to price signals, no waiting in line and no wastage of bread, acquired at a third of its real cost.
With a capped price and therefore below the equilibrium price (truthful prices), the quantity demanded of bread or spaghetti would be higher than the quantity offered. The resulting scarcity will generate waiting lines, more or less long. Waiting lines that create a “black market” and the perversions of associated speculation.
The waiting line becomes de facto a rationing mechanism for the highly demanded, low-offered product, since it is sold at a capped price. The Tunisian government has adopted, without saying so, this rationing system, saying that shortages are artificial and have no connection with market dysfunction and the regulation of prices and tariffs for products and services in Tunisia.
Participating in a waiting line that could stretch for a night, or at least several hours, becomes a strong signal of one’s eagerness to get that product.
This may discourage some and exclude others, those who will find another substitution product for the one originally in line for.
Although participants in the waiting line do not pay money for their place in the line, they pay dearly for this presence. The price is integrated into the value of the wasted time and all the other discomforts and risks: pushing, exposure to the sun, and touching of women, among other annoyances.
Economists are concerned that a waiting line favors those who have nothing else to do and excludes those who cannot, for example, afford to sacrifice their work, or be touched by strangers in these recurrent pushing in waiting lines.
Others, such as the frail and the sick, may not be able to access the waiting line at all.
A study published in 1977 by Martin Weitzman, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), showed that in cases where needs were more evenly distributed and where income was more unevenly distributed, rationing (of which waiting in line is a form) allows for more of the good to be allocated to those who have the most free time to wait in line outside stores and groceries.
Unregulated waiting lines, where people can exchange their places, can be addressed by market mechanisms. Paying someone to wait in line for you to buy bread, raises the cost price for the person who pays someone else to wait. And this can cost you two to 3 dinars, 20 to thirty times the price of the baguette.
Regulated waiting line
The British, generally enthusiastic and fair, would disapprove of paying someone to wait in line for you.
The “Queuers” queuing in London (for a museum or a show) receive bracelets to identify their place in the waiting line. This makes places in the waiting line non-transferable. It also prevents “line-cutting”, jumping the queue, and allows people to take breaks and go to the bathroom, without pushing or tension.
Economists have examined every step of the waiting line in order to be served and analyzed it with numbers. Their research helps decision-makers and users make wise business decisions on building efficient and profitable workflow systems, as it falls under operational research. The waiting line theory is used in a wide range of real-world applications.
The waiting line theory has been adopted by operations management specialists. It is mainly used to determine and classify staffing needs, inventory, and scheduling, which helps establish customer service efficiently and effectively.
The economic theory of the waiting line is regularly used by practitioners to improve processes. In the United States, Professor Wein of the Stanford School of Business applied the waiting line theory and its results led to the design of a system that reduces waiting times for medications and surgeries significantly, reducing mortality rates associated with this wait.
History of the waiting line theory
The waiting line theory has its roots in the research conducted by Agner Krarup Erlang, a Danish engineer, statistician, and mathematician, who created models to describe the Copenhagen telephone exchange in 1909.
In 1920, he modeled the number of telephone calls arriving at an exchange through a Poisson process and solved the M (arrival process) / D (service quantity) / k (amount of servers) waiting line model.
His work paved the way for the appearance of Erlang’s theory on efficient networks and the field of analysis of telephone networks.
His ideas have since been applied by various industries, including telecommunications, traffic engineering, information technology, and especially in industrial engineering, in the design of factories, stores, offices, and hospitals, as well as in project management.
Back to the waiting line in the local area
Observation of waiting lines in downtown Midoun in Djerba is rich in lessons in terms of launching new businesses connected to waiting lines. The people of Djerba are traders at heart. Three lessons deserve to be described:
– Around the coveted places by waiting lines (especially bakeries), several mobile businesses set up: the fisherman with his fresh fish, the seller of oranges and melons, the seller of parsley, coriander, … not to mention the seller of contraband Malboro packs. All these adjacent businesses (4 to 5 jobs) cling to the waiting line, to sell other products and do business, informally and adapted to the context.
– In the same waiting line, courteous exchanges may take place independently of those nearby, discussing economics (prices, etc.), politics (corruption, etc.), sociology… and making acquaintances, leading to social capital, the world is small, people end up meeting again later. Trust is established and this helps future transactions.
– By meeting regularly, members of the same waiting line become information disseminators in neighborhoods and social communities. Solidarity is also built with beggars and needy people who settle near the waiting line to take turns collecting a few coins, bread, or a string of freshly caught sardines on the nearby shores. The month of Ramadan is conducive to this, and without waiting lines, these beggars and needy people cannot easily beg and earn a living…
For many Tunisians, the bread waiting line eventually becomes a pastime, while waiting for the breaking of the fast. Tunisians generally tolerate the contingencies of waiting lines, “we can’t do anything…”
It is accommodated by ignoring especially that waiting lines are symptomatic of precarity and a delay in economic development. People do not want to recognize that these waiting lines convey the results of economic mismanagement and the direct implications of bad public policies.
Moktar Lamari, Economics for Tunisia, E4T
Read the original article(French) on Tunisie Focus
