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 report is concerned with the analysis of privatization and private sector development for the eastern and southernMediterranean countries partnered with the European Union and collectively known as MED-11. Noting that the analysis applies to the situation prior to the dislocations of the...

This paper provides an historical overview of aid flows to North Africa. It assesses the aid allocation process and argues that past aid flows to the region have been heavily influenced by donor political interests. This has reduced the effectiveness of aid which, with the exception of Tunisia,...

After a long period in which state-led development was the dominant economic paradigm, since the 1980s private sector development has been the focus for economic policy makers. It is probably no coincidence that economic growth, stagnant for a few decades in much of the developing world, took...

Innovation is widely recognized as a key driver of sustainable economic development. Governments, international organizations, donors and investors are increasingly interested in evaluating the technological capabilities and innovative capacities in developing countries, but often lack...

The last dozen years Corporate Governance (CG) has become an important subject in many countries around the world. Although it has been admitted that governance models vary greatly between different countries and that there is no single ideal model of governance (Mygind 1998), Turnbull (1997,...

This paper provides a synthesis of the country cases in the Middle East and North Africa: Oman, Bahrain, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates. Although these countries differ in terms of resource endowments and economic evolution, they share common aspects of successful development. This...

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is particularly vulnerable to climate change. The severity of climate-change impacts is related to the geographic and ecological particularity of the region. The majority of countries in the MENA region belong to the hydraulic poor regions located...

The present work analyses the impact of free trade agreements (FTAs) on the improvement of trade flows for ten Middle East and North African Countries (MENA) for the period 1990-2010. An extended gravity model is estimated to analyse the average and individual impact of six FTAs (four...

Youth unemployment, and unemployment, in the Middle East North Africa (MENA) countries are among the highest in the world. The tendency to generalize, however, is inappropriate as different groups of countries exhibit vastly different labor market outcomes and causes vary. The standard way of...