This paper constructs a coincident indicator for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) area business cycle. The resulting coincident indicator provides a reliable measure of the GCC business cycle; over the last decade, the GCC coincident index and the real GDP growth have moved closely together....

Given their pegged exchange rate regimes, Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries usually adjust their policy rates to match shifting U.S. monetary policy. This raises the important question of how changes in U.S. monetary policy affect banks in the GCC. We use bank-level panel data, exploiting...

Coordinating macroeconomic policies is a pre-requisite to a successful launch of the common currency in the GCC countries. Relying on the Behavioral Equilibrium Exchange Rate approach as a theoretical framework, we apply the Pooled Mean Group methodology to determine the similarity of the impact...

The six member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)-Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates (UAE)-have laid out a path to a common market by 2007 and monetary union by 2010, based on economic convergence. To monitor convergence and support economic and...

We compare the dollar peg to a dollar-euro basket peg as alternative exchange rate regimes for the incipient Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) currency union. Quantitative evidence suggests basket peg does not dominate dollar peg for improving external stability. However, as GCC exports and...

Looking ahead to the creation of a Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Currency Union in 2010, the paper covers some implications for the statistical programs of the GCC countries. Despite uncertainty over the structure of the proposed union, the paper envisions several types of mutually reinforcing...

A key issue in creating a new currency union is setting the rates to convert national currencies into the new union currency. Planned unions in the Gulf region and Africa are seeking methods to set the conversion rates when their new currencies are created. We propose a forward-looking...

The objective of the paper is to assess ownership and control links in the GCC corporate sector. The analysis focuses on the integrated ownership and network arising from ownership data available in Bloomberg and GCC stock exchanges. The paper finds that ownership is concentrated in GCC public...