This paper discusses the role of labor market flexibility in economic adjustment during the 1970s and the 1980s decades in developing countries in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. In the first part of the paper it is argued that the success of the Asian countries to adjust to...

This paper provides new national accounts consistent poverty estimates for low-income countries. The paper compares the properties of the new estimates that are based on household survey means to existing World Bank estimates. The new estimates are used to reflect on recent controversies...

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has lagged behind other regions in liberalization and economic reform during the past two decades. In this paper I argue that while socio-political and institutional factors may help explain the differences in the pace of economic reform between the...

This article reviews the different methods of constructing multilateral output and productivity indices for agriculture in cross-country panel studies. We show that various multilateral output indices used by different researchers can have considerable disparities, thus rendering the comparison...

Since the 1980s, the majority of countries in the MENA region facing severe exchange shortages have had to adopt policies directed towards stabilization and structural adjustment of their economies. Employment expansion and the structure and function of labor markets in these economies has been...

Recently, there has been an upsurge of empirical studies that test the convergence prediction of the neoclassical growth theory at the country, regional, state or provincial levels. These studies examine whether poorer economies will eventually catch up with richer ones in terms of both income...

This paper examines cause-specific labor force non-participation among women living in three impoverished communities on the outskirts of Beirut, Lebanon. It uses an expanded labor force utilization framework, separating the socially discouraged from other labor nonparticipants. This study is...

This paper examines Africa’s and Middle East’s growth performance for the period 1990- 2005. It employs a Bayesian Model Averaging method that constructs estimates as a weighted average of Spatial Autoregressive estimates for every possible combination of included variables. One of the...

In this paper we explore the dynamics of labor market adjustment in Morocco with a particular emphasis on the role of trade liberalization. We utilize the methodology of Davis and Haltiwanger (1990) which enables us to distinguish between job creation, job destruction, overall levels of...

This paper theoretically investigates the optimal monetary policy regime for post-war Iraq. We analyze the macroeconomic dynamics (inflation, output and exchange rate) and the credibility and reputation of the Central Bank of Iraq (CBI) under alternative monetary policy regimes. We construct a...