The size of government consumption relative to national output is examined to see if it is optimal in five Gulf countries of the Middle East. We follow the methodology suggested in Barro (1990) and Karras (1996, 1997) and examine the marginal productivity of government consumption. The "Barro...

This paper assesses several early warning (EWS) models of financial crises to propose a model that can predict the incidence of a currency crisis in developing countries. For this purpose, we employ the equal weighting (EW) and dynamic model averaging (DMA) approaches to combine forecast from...

We examine the role of democracy shocks in the cross-country economic growth processes over a period of five decades since 1960. The recent uprisings that arose independently and spread across the Arab world form the main context of our investigation. We study if (i) a shock to democracy in one...

This paper investigates the effect of oil price shocks on government expenditures on the health and education sectors in Saudi Arabia. Using a quarterly dataset 1990Q1-2017Q2 and employing a non-linear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) model, our research shows evidence of a non-linear...

We study the changing relationship between Brent oil prices and geopolitical risk, conditional on physical oil market conditions. We conduct the analysis at three frequencies, medium (1-3 years), high (2-3 months), and very high (daily), using three complementary techniques at the different...

This paper investigates the effects of low oil prices and heightened geopolitical risks on economic growth and investment in the Middle East and North African (MENA) countries. We employ a Global Vector Autoregression (GVAR) model with 53 countries, including 15 MENA countries, over the period...

This paper empirically investigates the relationship between corruption, political instability and economic growth. We first show how these variables interact by allowing for bidirectional causality between each two of the three variables for which we employ a panel VAR model on a dataset of 140...

Using an original firm-level dataset and utilizing the incidence of the Egyptian uprising of 2011, this paper provides an empirical investigation of the effects of firms' political connections on employment growth in Egypt. We use the differences-in-differences (DiD) framework to compare...

Africa's recent economic performance has been quite impressive. However, strong economic growth has not always corresponded to sufficient poverty reduction, partly because it has failed to generate productive employment. This paper compares the experiences of two fast growing African countries...