The size of government consumption relative to national output is examined to see if it is optimal in five Gulf countries of the Middle East. We follow the methodology suggested in Barro (1990) and Karras (1996, 1997) and examine the marginal productivity of government consumption. The "Barro...

This paper assesses several early warning (EWS) models of financial crises to propose a model that can predict the incidence of a currency crisis in developing countries. For this purpose, we employ the equal weighting (EW) and dynamic model averaging (DMA) approaches to combine forecast from...

This paper investigates the relationship between the recent global financial crisis and child labour in Tanzania. Using the difference-in-difference methodological framework, we identify households' access to credit as a possible transmission channel of the financial crisis to child labour....

We examine the role of democracy shocks in the cross-country economic growth processes over a period of five decades since 1960. The recent uprisings that arose independently and spread across the Arab world form the main context of our investigation. We study if (i) a shock to democracy in one...

This paper investigates the effect of oil price shocks on government expenditures on the health and education sectors in Saudi Arabia. Using a quarterly dataset 1990Q1-2017Q2 and employing a non-linear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) model, our research shows evidence of a non-linear...

We present new and rigorous mechanisms - a major weakness of the extant literature till date - to study spatiotemporal dynamic spillover effects of democratic shocks on cross-country economic growth in general and in Arab Spring, in particular. As a centrality of our research, we investigate how...

This paper empirically investigates the relationship between corruption, political instability and economic growth. We first show how these variables interact by allowing for bidirectional causality between each two of the three variables for which we employ a panel VAR model on a dataset of 140...

We investigate the joint dynamics of oil prices, financial liquidity and geopolitical risk, within a multi-country global vector-autoregressive (GVAR) model. We find that low oil prices are expected to trigger higher levels of geopolitical risk, and that decelerating financial liquidity serves...

The literature on economic determinants of democratization has identified most importantly the effects of economic development and income distribution. In this regard, Egypt had exhibited higher average incomes and declining inequality between 1999 and 2012. However, by 2015, the level of income...

This paper aims to provide an empirical investigation of the climate-growth joint dynamics considering exogenous shocks such as the COVID-19 in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, with no presumptions imposed on the direction of causality. To quantify climate change, we use...