Results from this cross-country study indicate that there are no simple patterns in how investment in schooling in the MENA countries differs from international experience. The regression results for 1965 and for 1994 show a wide diversity in enrollments at the primary and secondary school...

This paper seeks an explanation for the resilience of the Syrian authoritarian regime under Hafez and Bashar Al-Asad. It will be argued that this resilience is to a relevant extent caused by the fact that the regime’s “material” as well as “ideational” forms of power share a common...

Beginning by contrasting and comparing the fields of (feminist) anthropology and economics, this essay is a response to parts of Barbara Bergmann's article, “Becker's Theory of the Family: Preposterous Conclusions.” In attempting to expose the fallacies in Becker's discussion of the altruism...

ODELL P. R. (1997) The global oil industry: the location of production - Middle East domination or regionalization?, Reg. Studies 31, 311-322. Between 1955 and 1975, under increasingly competitive conditions, low-cost Middle East oil supplies gradually achieved the dominant role in the global...

This paper estimates the effects of politics and culture on Middle East trade by applying an augmented version of the gravity model. The econometric specification of the model accounts for oil-exporting countries, regional trade blocs and other pertinent exogenous factors. The model endogenously...

Saudi Arabia's accession to the WTO will promote the competitive advantages of the local industries, creating both opportunities and threats for certain sectors. This situation will call for urgent economic reforms in order to succeed the challenges of the accession. This study will attempt to...

The failure of conventional development to combat poverty has given rise to the concept of sustainable development. After decades of experience with Western economic models, the non-industrialised countries continue to suffer from inadequate economic stimulus to sustain growth. The Gulf...

Economists use various measures to account for the affect of poverty, welfare or health on economic growth but there is a lack of understanding of the movement of such variables over time and whether countries experiences similar trends. This paper presents an analysis of life expectancy across...

Arab political regimes are both unusually undemocratic and unusually stable. A series of statistical models are nested to parse competing explanations. The democratic deficit is comprehensible in terms of modernization, democracy waves, and the Arab population share, with the last determinant...

Empirical evidence shows that South Africa's equity market is the safest and better global shock absorber than equity markets in Morocco, Nigeria, Egypt and Ghana. Global shocks to Zimbabwe's market are neither short-lived nor long-lived. On one hand, variance decomposition analysis identifies...