This paper provides new evidence relating to the debate of whether long-lived TOT shocks affect saving rates using a sample of 56 developing countries for the period 1980-2010. The core aspect of the empirical analysis is to utilize the terms-of-trade (TOT) shock-duration and trend-growth...

This paper provides estimates of the exchange rate pass-through to the quarterly Consumer Price Index (CPI) in five Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Saudi Arabia) during the period 1999q1 to 2009q4. The degree of pass-through varies significantly...

Although countries of the MENA region are commonly considered as primary-commodity economies, they show sharp dissimilarities in a number of dimensions. Two important dimensions are the size of resource-endowments and the degree of labor market flexibility. Countries such as members of the Gulf...

This paper investigates the choice of optimal exchange rate regime for an oil-exporting small open economy, a case relevant to a large number of primary-commodity economies, in which the terms-of-trade are driven by world commodity price cycle. The new Keynesian small open economy model is...

The paper studies the interactions between credit, financial asset prices (namely equity prices), and consumer price inflation for the countries belonging to the Gulf Cooperation Council using quarterly observations from 1998:1 to 2009:4. The stock price is seen to have a positive and...

The literature on remittances is large and growing. However, its focus has mainly been on the effects of remittance inflows on the receiving economies. Little has been done on the sending economies. In this paper, we use data from Saudi Arabia, one of the top remitting countries in the world, to...

The recurring oil-price shocks that hit all economies in the world provide an opportunity to empirically test Friedman's hypothesis that flexible exchange regimes better absorb real external shocks. Using a sample of nine of the OECD's major oil-importing countries and Reinhart and Rogoff's de...

This study investigates the effect of economic development on womens well being by relating a countrys per capita GDP with several dimensions that affect womens affluence and well being within the economic, social and political context. Data from a sample of low and middle-income category of...

This research examines the impact of institutional quality on trade in selected Pacific Island Countries (PICs). Four indicators of institutional quality are chosen: government effectiveness, rule of law, regulatory quality and control of corruption; for six PICs: Fiji, Kiribati, Samoa, Solomon...

This paper investigates the effect of food prices on a number of health outcome indicators using published data for Pacific Island countries. The empirical results provide confirmation that while food prices are shown to be positively correlated with infant mortality and crude death rates, they...