This article focuses on China’s policy towards the peace process in the Middle East after the end of the Cold War and the American influence on Chinese policy. China has always charted its policy on the Arab-Israeli peace process to be ‘balanced diplomacy’, maintaining...

As the United States perceives the westward expansion of China’s influence as threatening both regional and worldwide balances of power, it has responded with an understandable but ill-conceived counter-action—the ‘Obama pivot’ from the Middle East to the Western...

Textual Analysis by Augmented Replacement Instructions (TABARI) provides an automated method for coding large amounts of text. Using TABARI to code lead sentences of news stories, the KEDS/Penn State Event Data project has produced event data for several regions. The wide range of events and...

The American University of Beirut’s Neighborhood Initiative was launched in 2007 to encourage faculty and students to contribute to solving the problems affecting the district of Beirut located just outside the university walls. Among the issues addressed are congestion, poor walkability,...

The 1988 Basel I Accord set the common requirements of bank capital to promote the soundness and stability of the international banking system. The agreement required banks to hold capital in proportion to their perceived credit risks, and this requirement may have caused a “credit crunch,”...

We investigate the complex interactions between credit constraints, political instability, and capital accumulation using a novel approach based on Kiyotaki and Moore’s (1997) theoretical framework. Drawing on a unique firm-level data set from Middle-East and North Africa (MENA),...

We investigate whether low loan-to-deposit (LTD) ratios and high levels of reserve balances at the central bank (or holdings of government securities) are a reflection of policy-driven factors compared to commonly cited reasons of reluctance to lend or sometimes weak investment demand in...

Since the onset of the Arab Spring, economic uncertainty in Egypt, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, and Yemen (Arab Countries in Transition, ACTs) has slowed already sluggish growth; worsened unemployment, particularly of youth; undermined business confidence, affected tourist arrivals, and...

This paper quantifies the effect of realized and potential global growth disappointments on export volumes from the Middle East, North Africa, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Estimates of export elasticities with respect to trading partner GDP indicate non-oil export volumes are relatively...

The recent uprising in the Middle East astonished the entire world when volcano of human patience erupted in the strategically most important region of the World – the Middle East. It is also known as the Middle East uprising. Taking start from Tunisia, one of the most developed oil producing...