Skills gaps, a lack of funding, and social norms continue to keep women and youth in North Africa from engaging in productive entrepreneurship. Using cross-national data and regional indicators from the World Bank and the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, this analysis shows how such barriers...

The Middle East and North Africa faces significant climate challenges, such as increasing temperatures, heightened flood risks, frequent droughts, and growing air pollution issues. These challenges are compounded by the large proportion of the population living below the poverty line in some...

This policy brief uses data from those efforts to document the role social norms play to support (or hinder) female labor force participation in a sample of MENA countries. Data was collected in Egypt, the Republic of Iraq, Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia between...

This report contains the annual summary of the wildfire season of 2024 on the basis of data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS). It is published early in 2025 to provide an advance comprehensive analysis of the wildfire season 2024. The analysis and data in the report...

Using panel data spanning 2004-2023 of 21 countries in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region, we measure systemic risk and assess its influence on key banking sector performance indicators, including financial stability (proxied by commercial bank branches per 100,000 adults), providing...

Skills gaps, a lack of funding, and social norms continue to keep women and youth in North Africa from engaging in productive entrepreneurship. Using cross-national data and regional indicators from the World Bank and the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, this analysis shows how such barriers...

Women's educational attainment has continuously increased across the Middle East, while fertility rates have declined substantially. Yet their labor force participation remains stubbornly low. To investigate this puzzle, I use a discrete choice experiment in Egypt that varies the gender...

This edition of the Macro Poverty Outlooks periodical contains country-by-country forecasts and overviews for GDP, fiscal, debt and poverty indicators for the developing countries of Middle East and North Africa. Macroeconomic indicators such as population, gross domestic product and gross...

Selon les estimations, la région du Moyen-Orient et de l'Afrique du Nord (MENA) a connu une croissance modeste de 1,9 % en 2024 et devrait croître modérément à 2,6 % en 2025. Cela s'inscrit dans un contexte d'incertitude mondiale accrue, en particulier en matière de politique commerciale....

Low investments in human development (HD) are both a cause and a consequence of economic performance and income growth. Thriving populations in knowledge societies are skilled, mobile, healthy, and connected. However, in most countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, human...

In many arid and semi-arid regions, rural women are at the heart of water-related dynamics - and therefore greatly affected by its scarcity. This scarcity affects their daily lives, farming activities, economic initiatives and solidarity networks, which are directly dependent on the availability...

Middle East and North Africa (MENA) gas exporters are facing long-term market and regulatory challenges in Europe. The near three-year continuous decline in Europe's gas demand since the beginning of the Ukraine crisis is a key challenge for these exporters who are concerned about whether this...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of financial inclusion on corporate investment. More specifically, this paper investigates the possibility of a nonlinear relationship between financial inclusion and corporate investment, as well as the moderating effect of audit quality in...

Smallholder farmers, who mostly engage in low-value agriculture in the drylands of Northern Africa, were the first to have felt the effects of climate change, with threats to their livelihoods and food security. The increasing costs of agricultural production, poor water and energy...

The paper examines how liquidity risk affects the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) bank profitability. Banks need profitability to survive, but liquidity risk measures long-term company health. Through Refinitiv Eikon, quantitative data was collected over 11 years from 2012 to 2022 for 71...

This report contains the annual summary of the wildfire season of 2023 on the basis of data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS). It is published early in 2024 to provide an advance comprehensive analysis of the wildfire season 2023. The analysis and data in the report...

This report contains the annual summary of the fire season of 2023 with official figures provided by 34 contributing countries for the number of fires, burnt areas and fire prevention efforts, and the analysis of fire danger and areas mapped in the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS).

This report contains the annual summary of the fire season of 2023 with official figures provided by 34 contributing countries for the number of fires, burnt areas and fire prevention efforts, and the analysis of fire danger and areas mapped in the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS).

Innovations to date in detecting women's employment have focused primarily on improving individual-level questions. This paper explores an alternative approach, using data on household enterprises and asking who participates in these activities. This research uses the latest waves of the Labor...

This paper quantifies the gains in gross domestic product per capita from closing gender employment gaps in the Middle East and North Africa, using three neoclassical growth models. The paper starts with baseline impacts from the Gender Employment Gap Index, which suggests that in the long run,...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to develop a new multidimensional financial inclusion index to measure the financial inclusion level for each of the 13 selected countries of the Middle East and North Africa region for the period 2004-2020. In addition, the comparative analysis approach...

Purpose: The relationship between financial inclusion and economic growth is an intriguing topic that is generating extensive attention among researchers and merits comprehensive investigation. This paper aims to empirically explore this relationship using panel data for 13 Middle Eastern and...

This paper assesses the state and resilience of corporate and banking sectors in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in a "higher-for-longer" interest rate environment using granular micro data to conduct the first cross-country corporate and banking sector stress tests for the MENA region....

The conflict in Gaza and Israel is yet another shock to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. It is causing immense human suffering and exacerbating an already challenging environment for neighboring economies and beyond. This Update covers economies in the MENA region and does not...

This study contributes to the literature on the relationship between trade, labour and environmental sustainability by providing empirical evidence at the firm level. For this purpose, it first explores whether exporting firms are more likely than non-exporting firms to adopt green measures....

This edition of the Macro Poverty Outlooks periodical contains country-by-country forecasts and overviews for GDP, fiscal, debt and poverty indicators for the developing countries of the Middle East and North Africa region. Macroeconomic indicators such as population, gross domestic product and...

The global economy is in its third year of deceleration amidst declining inflation and oil prices. The MENA region grew at 1.9 percent in 2023 and is forecasted to grow at 2.7 percent in 2024. And for the first time since the pandemic, MENA oil exporters and importers will grow at similar rates....

NATO’s 2023 summit in Vilnius was dominated by Russia’s war against Ukraine. The summit in Washington, D.C., in July 2024 will be influenced by an additional major conflict in NATO’s neighbourhood: the war in Gaza and the related heightened tensions in the Middle East. These have also...

We quantify in more detail than earlier studies the cost trade-offs of establishing import-export links between Europe and North Africa for two quintessential energy carriers needed for the energy transition: electricity and hydrogen. Using the TIAM-ECN model, we show under what assumptions...