We review the policy arguments in favour of assisting SMEs in various areas of their operations. Our review suggests that many of the arguments put forward for subsidising SME activities (as distinct from some activities of firms regardless of size) are not economically justified. Nonetheless,...

This paper employs quarterly time series data to endogenously determine the timing of structural breaks for various macroeconomic variables in Korean economy. The Innovational Outlier (IO) as well as Additive Outlier models (Perron, 1997) are then used to test for non-stationarity of the Korean...

Since the onset of the Civil War in 1975 Lebanon has experienced burgeoning fiscal deficits and an unsustainable public debt overhang. Much of this arose from the loss of revenues during the period of the Civil War 1975-90 and attempts to maintain basic public expenditure, while from 1990-2006...

Increased global demand for energy and other resources, particularly from the rapidly developing economies of China and India and the opening up of global resource markets to global investors and speculative activity, has resulted in considerable recent turbulence in resource prices. The recent...

The productivity and efficiency of the financial sector is pivotal to the attainment of economic growth and development in developed and developing economies alike, and is of particular interest in the wake of financial sector reform and restructuring. This study applies the Malmquist...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationships between stock market returns of 13 countries based upon monthly data spanning December 1987 to April 2007. Design/methodology/approach – Specifically, the principal component (PC) and maximum likelihood (ML) methods are...

The productivity and efficiency of the financial sector is pivotal to the attainment of economic growth and development in developed and developing economies alike, and is of particular interest in the wake of financial sector reform and restructuring. This study applies the Malmquist...

Increased global demand for energy and other resources, particularly from the rapidly developing economies of China and India and the opening up of global resource markets to global investors and speculative activity, has resulted in considerable recent turbulence in resource prices. The recent...