This paper takes stock of the economic performance of resource rich countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) over the past forty years. While those countries have maintained high levels of income per capita, they have performed poorly when going beyond the assessment based on...

This paper examines how financial development affects the sources of growth-productivity and investment-using a sample of 145 countries for the period 1960-2011. We employ a range of econometric approaches, focusing on the CCA and MENA countries. The analysis looks beyond financial depth to...

Both sides of the institutions and growth debate have resorted largely to microeconometric techniques in testing hypotheses. In this paper, I build a panel structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model for a short panel of 119 countries over 10 years and find support for the institutions...

Since the 1980's with the introduction of IMF/WB adjustment programs structural reforms have been a core part of the reform agenda in the Caribbean. The paper reviewed the package of structural reforms in trade liberalization, financial liberalization and tax policy, and gauges their impact on...

Major output collapses are costly and frequent in the developing world. Using cross-country data, we classify five-year periods using a two-dimensional state space based on growth regimes and political institutions. We then model the joint evolution of output growth and political institutions as...

India's real GDP growth slipped substantially after the North Atlantic financial crisis. Return to a sustained high growth trajectory is feasible but it will need much more focused attention to the revival of manufacturing and to the acceleration of investment in transport and infrastructure....

This paper analyzes spillovers from macroeconomic shocks in systemic economies (China, the Euro Area, and the United States) to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region as well as outward spillovers from a GDP shock in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and MENA oil exporters to...

The paper analyzes the relationship between bank competition and stability, with a specific focus on the Middle East and North Africa. Price competition has a positive effect on bank liquidity, as it induces self-discipline incentives on banks for the choice of bank funding sources and for the...

This paper examines the extent to which firms in selected MENA countries reported being constrained by the business environment around the time of the Arab Spring and the extent to which these constraints affected their employment performance. The results suggest that small firms in MENA faced...