Over the past two years, ongoing political transitions in many Arab countries have led to social unrest and an economic downturn. This paper examines comparable historical episodes of political instability to derive implications for the near- and medium-term economic outlook in the Arab...

The paper employs a heuristic comparative approach suggested by Ismail (2009) to search for evidence of Dutch disease in oil-rich countries of the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC). While these countries have benefitted from high international oil prices in recent years,...

While the underlying methodologies continue to be widely debated and refined, there is little consensus on how to assess the equilibrium exchange rate of economies dominated by production of finite natural resources such as the oil economies of the Middle East. In part this is due to the...

This paper examines the changing nature of growth spillovers between developed economies, the North, and developing countries, the South, driven by the process of globalization?the phenomenon of rising international trade and financial flows. We use a comprehensive database of macroeconomic and...

This paper examines the relationship between monetary policy and oil prices within a world oil demand and supply model. Low price and high income elasticities of demand and rigid supply explain high price volatilities and producers' market power. Exchange and interest rates do influence oil...

This paper provides a brief overview of the evolution of exchange rate policy in the Islamic Republic of Iran from 1993 to 2002 and reviews the basic criteria for the choice of the exchange rate regime in the medium term. The analysis highlights the merits of an intermediate regime which would...

This paper describes potential benefits from Canada's expanding oil sands production, higher energy exports, and further improvements in the terms of trade. Contrary to the previous Canadian exchange rate literature, this paper finds that both energy and nonenergy commodity prices have an...

This paper estimates the effect of grants and workers' remittances on Jordan's long-term equilibrium real exchange rate. We estimate an equilibrium path for the Jordanian real exchange rate using the Johansen cointegration methodology over the period 1964 to 2005. Controlling for other...

This paper re-examines empirical exchange rate puzzles by focusing on three OECD economies (Australia, Canada, and New Zealand) where primary commodities constitute a significant share of their exports. For Australia and New Zealand especially, we find that the U.S. dollar price of their...