Abstract: The economies of the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries are heavily reliant on oil. Greater economic diversification would reduce their exposure to volatility and uncertainty in the global oil market, help create jobs in the private sector, increase productivity and...

A key priority for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries is to create a dynamic non-oil tradable sector to support sustainable growth. Since export diversification takes a long time, it has to start now. We argue that the failure to diversify away from oil stems mainly from market...

A universal testing and isolation policy is the most viable way to vanquish a pandemic. Its implementation requires: (i) an epidemiological rather than clinical approach to testing, sacrificing accuracy for scalability, convenience and speed; and (ii) state intervention to ramp up production,...

The debate among economists about an optimal growth recipe has been the subject of competing "narratives." We identify four major growth narratives using the text analytics of IMF country reports over 1978-2019. The narrative "Economic Structure"-services, manufacturing, and agriculture-has been...

Industrial policy is tainted with bad reputation among policymakers and academics and is often viewed as the road to perdition for developing economies. Yet the success of the Asian Miracles with industrial policy stands as an uncomfortable story that many ignore or claim it cannot be...

We analyze the costs of trade restrictions for a small developing economy. Capital goods are only introduced on the market if it is profitable to do so. The economy evolves to a balanced growth path in which income, welfare, and the share of introduced capital goods increase if trade...

Using a novel data set from post-communist countries in the 1990s, this paper examines linkages between political constraints, economic reforms and growth. A dynamic panel analysis suggests public support for reform is negatively associated with income inequality and unemployment. Both the ex...

Malawi has been implementing structural adjustment reforms since 1981 in search of a way to revive its declining economic growth triggered by the oil shocks and general world economic recession of the mid and late 1970’s. These structural reforms were meant to liberalise the economy, broaden...

The paper studies the ways an economy working under a currency board could adjust when capital inflows stop suddenly. Six alternative solutions to restore the economic equilibrium are available when the sudden stop comes: a recession could push the prices of non-tradable goods down, a...