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 1975-1990 and attempts to maintain basic public expenditure, while from 1990 to...

We examine if the introduction of the euro had significant and different effects on the stock markets of euro-zone countries, non-euro EU and accession countries, and non-EU countries. We argue that the introduction of the euro was equivalent to a market reform rather than an event whose impact...

International trade in Syria is highly regulated through a combination of tariffs and non-tariff barriers. At 8% of the value of imports on average, effective tariffs are relatively low. However, non-tariff barriers to trade actually make Syria's trade restrictiveness very high. Comparing world...

A monetary policy framework based on targeting a relative inflation-forecast is proposed for the economies converging to the euro. Such strategy aims at containing the differentials between the domestic and the implicit monetary union inflation-forecasts. Hence, these differentials become a...

Using a nonlinear flexible regression model for four economies in east Asia, we re-examine two hypotheses in light of the causal relationship between inflation and inflation uncertainty. The first, proposed by Friedman [Friedman, M. (1977). Nobel lecture: Inflation and unemployment. Journal of...

In low-income countries, the use of tax revenues to fund tourism promotions is motivated in part by the belief that tourism growth will improve income distribution by expanding demand for relatively low-skilled labor. We examine this belief for the case of Thailand, a highly tourism-intensive...

Research on climate change has intensified on a global scale as evidence on the costs of global warming continues to accumulate. Confronted with such evidence, the European Union set in late 2006 an ambitious target to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, by 2020, to 20% below the level of 1990; and...

In a panel of West African countries, we investigate whether data on immigrant remittance flows can be used to improve on predictive accuracy of aggregate demand in a systematic way. The results of the prediction experiments are compared to traditional significance tests of asymmetric error...

Drug producing regions often supply several geographically distinct drug consumption markets. Disruptions of opium cultivation in Afghanistan and cocaine production in Colombia show that consumption reductions can be much smaller in some final markets than are reductions in cultivation. This...