Among the principal constraints for SME lending is the lack of SME transparency, poor credit information from credit registries and bureaus, and weak creditor rights. If constraints can be addressed, lending can potentially reach bank targets of 21 percent. State banks still play an important...

Many countries in the MENA region have established partial credit guarantee schemes to facilitate SME access to finance. These schemes can play an important role, especially in a period where MENA governments are making efforts to improve the effectiveness of credit registries and bureaus and...

Although both domestic and foreign private banks have gained ground in MENA in recent years, state banks continue to play an important role in many countries. Using a MENA bank-level panel dataset for the period 2001-08, the paper contributes to the empirical literature by documenting recent...

In the Middle East and North Africa, food security and water security are tightly entwined. In particular, choices about the extent to which food security policies rely on trade rather than domestically produced staples have stark consequences for the region's limited water resources. This paper...

This paper uses a panel of annual observations for 198 banks in 19 Middle East and North Africa countries over 2001-12 to develop an early warning system for forecasting bank insolvency based on a multivariate logistic regression framework. The results show that the traditional CAMEL indicators...

Although child mortality rates have declined all across the developing world over the past 40 years, they have declined the most in the Middle East and North Africa region. This paper documents this remarkable experience and shows that it is broad based in the sense that all countries in the...

This paper examines broadly the intergovernmental structure in the Middle East and North Africa region, which has one of the most centralized government structures in the world. The authors address the reasons behind this centralized structure by looking first at the history behind the tax...

This paper addresses the issue of the low level of private investment in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, with special emphasis on the role of governance. Based on the existing literature, the authors categorize what types of governance institutions are more detrimental to...