This paper investigates the patterns of agricultural productivity growth in Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries during the period 1970–2000. We use a nonparametric, output-based Malmquist index to examine whether our estimates confirm or invalidate the results of previous studies...

The purpose of this paper is to explain regional growth and agglomeration of industrial activities in Tunisia between 2000 and 2005. Based on the contributions of the new economic geography, and the theoretical approach dealing with the relationship between externalities and regional growth, an...

The two major earthquakes which struck northwestern Turkey in 1999, not only caused enormous amounts of death, destruction and suffering, but also exposed rampant government corruption involving construction and zoning code violations. The incompetence shown by the government in providing...

In 1988, an agreement was reached in Basel to set common requirements of bank capital in order to promote the soundness and stability of the international banking system. In line with the agreement, banks were requir ed to hold capital in proportion to their perceived credit risks, which may...

The goal of this paper is to examine, whether the results of new growth cross-country empirics (Barro-type model) match the results of growth accounting exercise in Syria, during the period 1965-2004. To deal with this matter three main steps are followed. The first is, using cross-country...

This paper investigates the link between private investment decisions and various governance institutions in the form of corruption, quality of bureaucracy, judiciary, security of property rights, regulations and taxation, political stability, as well as political rights and civil liberties....

This paper investigates whether the financial liberalization that Morocco has been undertaking since the early 1990's has affected the demand for money. To achieve this analysis, the Johansen maximum-likelihood procedure is employed to estimate the long-run equilibrium relationship between real...

The paper investigates the macroeconomic effects of workers’ remittances on the economies of the Gulf Cooperation Council. The theoretical Dutch Disease model is augmented in order to take into account migration and remittances, and the paper shows that workers’ remittances from the Gulf...

This paper investigates the impact of global financial conditions, US macroeconomic news and domestic macroeconomic fundamentals on the evolution of Emerging Market Bond Index EMBI spreads for a panel of 18 emerging markets (EM) using daily data. To this end, we employ not only the conventional...

Since the early 1990s some industrialized economies have implemented a monetary policy regime shift known as inflation targeting. This shift was justified by the difficulties posed by targeting the nominal exchange rate, or in some instances money supply. Given the very encouraging experience of...