The Middle East and North Africa economies face an uncertain recovery. The war in Ukraine presents significant challenges to the global economy and the MENA region. Inflationary pressures brought about by the pandemic are likely to be further exacerbated by the conflict. The potential for rising...

Foreign direct investment (FDI) flows to developing countries surged in the 1990s to become their leading source of external financing. This rise in FDI volume was accompanied by a marked change in its composition: investment taking the form of acquisition of existing assets (mergers and...

This paper explores empirically the role of risk and return in the observed evolution of net foreign asset positions of industrial and developing economies. The paper adopts a dynamic approach in which investors' portfolios adjust gradually to their long-run equilibrium, defined by a standard...

Economic growth in the Sub-Saharan Africa region has been plagued by a series of shocks-wars, political instability, natural disasters, epidemics, terms-of-trade deterioration, and sudden stops in capital inflows-that have had lingering effects on productivity and growth. Within the overall...

This paper investigates the role of valuation effects on a country's net foreign asset position. It shows that following transitory output shocks, valuation effects are stabilizing; they counteract current account movements and mitigate the impact of the current account on a country's net...

Recent cross-section studies have demonstrated a strong link between measures of corruption, bureaucratic quality, property rights, and other institutional variables, and economic growth. In this paper we build on previous research and present some empirical evidence on the direction of...

This paper examines the roles of cost of labour input and competition on productivity dispersion in the Vietnamese manufacturing sector. We look at the effect accounting for labour input quality has on explaining productivity dispersion. This paper tests the hypothesis that mismeasurement of...

This study examines the technical efficiency of schools in Australia and its determinants using NAPLAN test results of about 6,800 schools in 2009-2011 and other information from the “My School” website. For each school, we use the average growth of test scores for the same students between...

Since the start of the Eurozone, the pattern of debt ows to Peripheral Europe seems puzzling: they were mostly indirect and intermediated by the large countries of the euro area. This paper examines the euro currency risk and the business cycle risk as two opposing forces: while the currency...