This paper argues that trade and capital account reforms within autocracies underlie the primacy of foreign currency procurement. A longitudinal comparison of four countries (Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan) in the Middle East and North Africa region shows a historical sequencing of reforms....

We estimate the size and trend of the Egyptian shadow economy using two of the most common methods: the currency demand approach and the structural equation MIMIC model. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive study to estimate the size of the shadow economy in Egypt during...

In Tunesien, Ägypten und Libyen wurden 2011 nach Massenprotesten und blutigen Auseinandersetzungen die langjährigen Machthaber Ben Ali, Mubarak und Qaddafi gestürzt. Alle drei Staaten befinden sich seither in einem noch nicht abgeschlossenen Transformationsprozess. Diese Umbruchphase ist...

We assess the contribution of "undue optimism" (Pigou) to short-run fluctuations. In our analysis, optimism pertains to total factor productivity which determines economic activity in the long run, but is not contemporaneously observed by market participants. In order to recover optimism shocks...

We make use of a bootstrap panel analysis of causality between energy use and economic growth for a sample of sixteen African countries over the period 1988-2010. Our results show that growth and energy use are strongly linked in Africa. However, African countries are heterogeneous and there is...

Using a large, original database of 385 politically connected firms under the Mubarak regime in Egypt, we document for the first time the negative impact of cronyism on economic growth. In the early 2000s, a policy shift in Egypt led to the expansion of crony activities into new, previously...