Recent academic and policy discussions have emphasized the poor growth performance of MENA's economies since the mid 1980s. It has been argued that the expanding global economy presents MENA with the opportunity to augment its limited pool of national savings with private capital inflows....

The paper aims at putting forward recommendations with respect of the new association agreement between the European Union (EU) and the Palestinian Territories which will be negotiated soon. In the process, the earlier association agreement is reviewed within the context of the EU's...

A review of recent studies that attempt to estimate the potential gain from the Arab region integration in the World economy indicates initial losses of significant gains. The paper reviews development in the Arab region, examines relevant recent experience from SE Asia, and attempts to outline...

The paper investigates the issue in the case of Tunisia for which a 1996 World Bank published report recommended shrinking the size of its government on the basis of conclusions from cross-country growth studies. Analysis of the causal impact of government size on growth in this country proves...

The Arab countries face a number of serious challenges with the consolidation of a new world economic order. The paper discusses some of these challenges: the absence of national science and technology systems (S&T-Systems, the engines through which science and technology is acquired and...

The paper aims to identify the interests and concerns of MENA countries in the new round of multilateral trade negotiations (the WTO 2000 negotiations) with a view of helping these countries develop negotiation objectives and strategies.

One of the consequences of globalization is the increased vulnerability of small nations to the events happening in the advanced world. This study estimates the macro-economic linkages between the GCC and the G7 countries. A small model has been developed with only seven key variables. Four of...

This paper discusses the role of labor market flexibility in economic adjustment during the 1970s and the 1980s decades in developing countries in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. In the first part of the paper it is argued that the success of the Asian countries to adjust to...

This paper is concerned with the estimation of stochastic frontier production functions with unbalanced panel data when unobservable firm efficiency levels are related to explanatory variables. We perform the "weighted-means" instrumental variables panel data model proposed by R. Gardner (1998)...

This paper sets out to investigate some aspects of the differential inpact of the process of globalization on labor oucomes in countries of the MENA region. It examines the impact of the process of globalization on the nature of labor processes and the new employment profiles, explores the...