Utopian socialists believed that socialism is inevitable because it is a more rational system to organize production and life, a system more in line with the “good” nature of human beings. Marxism rejected this reasoning replacing it with what is known as historical materialism: social...

This paper analyzes economic policies in resource rich countries and various mechanisms of resource curse leading to a potentially inefficient use of resources. Arguments are provided in favor of "conditional resource curse" hypothesis: resource abundance hampers growth if institutions of a...

This study uses multivariate cointegration and variance decomposition techniques to investigate the causal relationship between government expenditures and economic growth for Egypt, Israel and Syria, for the past three decades. When testing for causality within a bivariate system of total...

This paper examines the causal relationship between financial development and economic growth in Egypt during the period 1960-2001 within a trivariate VAR setting. We employ four different measures of financial development and apply Granger causality tests using the cointegration and vector...

This paper examines the causal relationship between financial development and economic growth in five Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries for different periods ranging from 1960 to 2004, within a trivariate vector autoregressive (VAR) framework. We employ four different measures of...

Sachs, Warner (1995) were among the first to claim that «resource curse» is real and that resource abundant economies do indeed grow more slowly than the others. Hundreds of papers were published since then supporting the «resource curse» thesis and offering new explanations of mechanisms...

The paper examines the export-led growth (ELG) hypothesis for nine Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries in three-variable vector autoregressive and error correction models. When considering total exports, our results reject the ELG hypothesis in almost all of these countries. When we...

This paper summarizes theoretical arguments and provides empirical evidence to support the statement that rational economic policies depend qualitatively on two factors – technological and institutional level of development of a country. We concentrate on the impact of three policies to...

This paper summarizes theoretical arguments, empirical evidence, and econometric findings to support the statement that rational economic policies depend qualitatively on stages of development that are defined by productivity and institutional indicators of a country. We consider the impact of...

Cross-country regressions, reported in this paper for 1960-99 period, seem to suggest that the accumulation of foreign exchange reserves (FER) contributes to economic growth of a developing economy by increasing both the investment/GDP ratio and capital productivity. We offer the following...