There is mixed support for the hypothesis that the banking sector is a channel for economic growth. While most studies on economic growth in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries have not distinguished between conventional banks and Islamic banks, this study contributes to the empirical...

Essentially, the impact of the currency union on member countries depends on whether the common currency area is optimal in the sense that the effect of the asymmetric shocks is small, Mundell (1961). Typically, researchers use VAR of different types to analyze the data. For robustness, we use...

The Gulf Cooperation Council countries (GCC) include Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Their monetary policy objective is to stabilize the foreign price, i.e., exchange rate instead of the domestic price level, where the nominal interest rate is equalized with the US...

This paper discusses the choice of an optimal external anchor for oil exporting economies, using optimum currency area criteria and simulations of a simple model of a small open economy pegging to a basket of two currencies. Oil exporting countries .in particular those of the Gulf Cooperation...