Following a period of rapid growth in the late 19th century, Egyptian real per capita income stagnated in the first half of the 20th century. This widely accepted belief is based on trends in agricultural productivity but a fragmented body of evidence on aggregate output. In particular, no...

Recent academic and policy discussions have emphasized the poor growth performance of MENA's economies since the mid 1980s. It has been argued that the expanding global economy presents MENA with the opportunity to augment its limited pool of national savings with private capital inflows....

In response to the recent wave of privatization and regulation of monopolies in developing countries, this paper evaluates the impact of regulation on private sector behavior in the telecommunications sector in seven countries. It shows that regulation is most effective (as evidenced by...

This paper provides an overview of the employment experience in the Middle East and North Africa in the past two decades. The oil boom of the 1970s and the resulting international migration permitted an expansion in public sector employment and a redistribution of the labor force from countries...

The increased emphasis on the role of human capital in economic growth has raised the level of interest in its mechanism of accumulation. Countries differ in the efficiency with which they teach their young, as they do in their savings and investment behavior. The recent household economics...

Like most other petroleum-exporting countries, Iran subsidizes domestic consumption of refined products. Real product prices have declined for the past 25 years while the rest of the world has adjusted to higher energy prices. In this paper I describe the market for petroleum products in Iran...

It is quite challenging to operationalize the notion of job quality for wage and salary employment, and even more challenging to devise a measure of job quality for non-wage workers. This paper takes up this challenge and attempts to provide a measure for job quality among the self -employed and...

The main challenge tackled by this study is to estimate a structural equation for children's employment as a function of parental and own wages, which are assumed to be simultaneously determined with the child?s employment status. The results indicate that employment of children is responsive to...

The main objective of this paper is to determine the causal relationship between child work and school enrollment in Egypt while taking into account the simultaneous nature of family (or child) decisions regarding school and work activities. We also assess how a broader definition of work,...

Cross-section data on non-contractual construction workers in Egypt reveal strong attachment to the sector despite demand instability. Also present are statistically significant wage differentials between construction trades. Preliminary examination suggests that employers might be compensating...