The unravelling of the Middle-East peace process continues to baffle the pundits. The early optimism of the Oslo peace accord has now turned into despair. Prime minister Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist. The Palestinians have embarked on a new Intifada. And Israel has re-occupied...

Many observers of the Israeli scene have been perplexed by the country’s apparent resilience to bad political news. The headlines of late seem uniformly dreadful. While the country is still licking its wounds from a botched, if not humiliating war with Hezbollah, the Palestinian territories...

This essay examines the Israeli market structure from the perspective of ownership. We distinguish between the several corporate holding-groups that dominate the ‘Big Economy’ and the multitude of smaller, largely independent, business entities of the ‘Small Economy’. Although the two...

Over the past century, Israel has been transformed from an agricultural colony, to a welfare-warfare state, to a globally integrated “market economy” characterised by great income disparities. What lies behind this transformation? Why the shift in emphasis from “war profits” to “peace...

The purpose of this article is to offer an alternative analytical framework for understanding the long term transformation in Israel. First, we argue against the conventional separation between the “political system” and the “economic system.” This separationist approach has been popular...

A theoretical and historical account of the global political economy of oil, armament and capital accumulation in the Middel East.

Disability insurance - the insurance against the loss of the ability to work - is a substantial part of social security expenditures in many countries. The benefit recipiency rates in disability insurance vary strikingly across European countries and the US. This paper investigates the extent...

A number of distributions have been used to describe income distribution. This paper estimates eleven distributions (GB, GB1, GB2, B, B1, B2, GG, BR3, BR12, GA, and LN) using data from eight countries (Australia, Canada, Israel, Norway, Russia, Taiwan, United Kingdom, and the United States) for...

We study the effect of parental job loss on child school dropout in developing countries. We focus on Palestinian households living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and having the household head employed in Israel during the Second Intifada (2000-2006). We exploit quarterly variation in...

In the European Union and its neighborhood, regional development has increasingly come to focus on agglomerations during the last three decades. Notably, during the 1990s and early 2000s, clustering was the major policy focus in regional development. Currently, the concept of smart...