This paper investigates the impact of openness to trade and higher levels of human capital on the economies of some MENA countries. To answer the question: whether either human capital or openness can be shown to cause productivity, we use panel data on 16 countries spanning the 1965-2000...

This paper examines the determinants of private tutoring in five major Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries, Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon, Morocco, and Tunisia. The paper uses data extracted from the SAHWA Youth Survey (2016) and runs a probit model. The main findings indicate that age,...

Youth empowerment, i.e., the ability of young people to take control over key aspects of their lives, has become a growing concern to achieving sustainable development worldwide. An increasing number of policy interventions is targeting the youth, but to monitor the progress a better...

This paper identifies gaps in availability, access, and quality of household budget surveys in the Middle East and North Africa region used to measure monetary poverty and evaluates ways to fill these information gaps. Despite improving public access to household budget surveys, the availability...

The worldwide obesity epidemic has impacted women more heavily than men. These gender-based differences are particularly pronounced in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region where gender obesity gaps on average exceed 10 percentage points. This paper examines one of the explanations,...

We use an implicit association test (IAT) to measure implicit gender attitudes and examine the malleability of these attitudes using a randomized field experiment and quasi-experimental data from Tunisia. Women that appear most conservative respond to a randomized video treatment by reducing...

Female labor force participation rates across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have remained low for over four decades, despite the fact that in the same period, women's education rapidly increased and fertility rates substantially decreased. This surprising phenomenon has remained...

This paper provides evidence of the long-run effects of a permanent increase in agricultural productivity on conflict. We construct a newly digitized and geo-referenced dataset of battles in Europe, the Near East and North Africa covering the period between 1400 and 1900 CE. For variation in...

This paper throws new light on the relationship between income and democracy. Using data for 162 countries over 1960-2018, we show that the causal relationship between political and economic development is U-shaped: "intermediate" political regimes significantly lead to inferior economic...

Does fiscal decentralization in a politically decentralized less developed country help strengthen democratic institutions at the grass root level? And is the impact of such decentralization on local politics important in determining local development? Our study on Indonesia suggests that fiscal...