Similar to most other developing countries, almost all Arab countries failed to catch up economically with advanced industrial countries. This paper discusses three possible explanations of the disappointing growth performance: (i) an insufficient reformmindedness of developing country...

The paper aims to examine the role of institutions relative to economic policy and geography in explaining the differential level of development across countries over time. To that end, it attempts to construct a Development Quality Index (DQI) and an Institutional Quality Index (IQI) by using...

The paper uses nonparametric methodology to examine the role of institutions in understanding differential levels of development across countries. This technique estimates first order derivatives for every country allowing a deeper look into the impact of institutions on development. The...

We obtain time series estimates of the long run growth rates of 17 OECD countries, and test the hypothesis that these are the same across countries. We find that we cannot reject this hypothesis for the first and last three decades of the 20th century. We conclude that: (i) there are few, if...

This paper deals with the implications of natural resources for the conduct of economic policies and the role and design of institutions in resource-rich countries. The paper briefly reviews the experience of a few resource-rich countries, highlighting the successes of those that have done well...

This study offers insight into the multifaceted relationship between economic policy uncertainty, foreign direct investment, and financial development. It analyzes the effects of economic policy uncertainty and financial development on foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows, using a sample of...

In this work, we propose to study the impact of macroeconomic variables on stock returns. For that, we use data from five individual stock exchanges: Dow Jones and Nasdaq 100 for the USA, Nikkei 225 for Japan, FTSE 100 for England, and DAX40 for Germany and macroeconomic variables such as...