Over the past 10 years, the de facto alliance of the governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates has exercised significant influence over developments in the Middle East. The common goal has been to prevent democratic transformation, stop the rise of political Islam and...

Over the past 10 years, the de facto alliance of the governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates has exercised significant influence over developments in the Middle East. The common goal has been to prevent democratic transformation, stop the rise of political Islam and...

Environmental security models predict that natural resource scarcities, in particular freshwater, can increase the probability of conflict within and between countries. This is an especially critical problem on internationally shared rivers in the arid Middle East. Riparians in the arid US west...

This paper examines the state and scope of the study of economic history of developing regions, underlining the importance of knowledge of history for economic development. While the quality of the existing research on developing countries is impressive, the proportion of published research...

The size of government consumption relative to national output is examined to see if it is optimal in five Gulf countries of the Middle East. We follow the methodology suggested in Barro (1990) and Karras (1996, 1997) and examine the marginal productivity of government consumption. The "Barro...

Islamic economics is part of the Islamic fundamentalist movement gaining ground in large parts of the Muslim world. The call is for a return to Islamic law, Shari'a, which is believed to offer solutions to economic and social problems of all times and places. This paper presents Islamic...

An 'Environmental Diamond' for the Levant is proposed, similar to the World Bank's 'Development Diamond'. It would serve as a framework for evaluating ecosystem risk for the countries in the Jordan Basin that are currently facing a sustainability crisis. The approach followed by this paper was...

Although a millennium ago the Middle East was not an economic laggard, by the 18th century it exhibited clear signs of economic backwardness. The reason for this transformation is that certain components of the region’s legal infrastructure stagnated as their Western counterparts gave way to...

Previous studies that have estimated the money demand function in Middle Eastern countries employed either traditional estimation techniques or recently popularized cointegration techniques. The first group suffers from spurious regression problems; the second group interprets cointegration as a...

This study uses multivariate cointegration and variance decomposition techniques to investigate the causal relationship between government expenditures and economic growth for Egypt, Israel and Syria, for the past three decades. When testing for causality within a bivariate system of total...