Export diversification has become a priority goal for the development strategies of the MENA countries. In this paper, we aim at measuring the effects of exports’ diversification on growth in MENA countries. But we also try to assess the way new exports and FDI interact each others in the...

In this paper, we argue that the Arab spring can be understood as a violent criticism of and attack against the post-Independence social contract that prevailed in most Middle East and North African countries. We show that this social contract, characterized by the combination of high levels of...

This paper quantitatively compares Middle East and North African (MENA) countries’ growth patterns with those of a sample of middle-income countries. Three complementary sets of growth determinants are tested: accumulation, institutions and structural change. After having estimated the model...

Macroeconomic determinants of FDI are seldom analyzed from the perspective of source countries, priority being given to host country characteristics. In a gravity set-up, we show that output volatility of source country has a significant adverse impact on FDI flowing to developing economies that...

The existing literature points to a series of determinants of FDI attraction such as the size of markets, the costs of labor, infrastructure, the educational level of the labor force, or policy reforms and political stability … However, potential trade-offs or complementarities between similar...

In this paper, we build a structural model of growth and we estimate it on panel data. We go further than the previous studies of Bende et al. (2000, 2003) or Li & Liu (2005), because we not only control for the endogenity of FDI towards growth, but we also control for the endogenity of FDI...

Human capital measures (schooling) are poorly significant in explaining growth for developing countries. An explanation is that increases in human capital have no significant effect on growth if this human capital is misallocated and underemployed. In a simple two-sector model of a small open...

In this paper, we ask if the convergence in policies leads to a convergence in growth dynamics for MENA countries. We first show that FDI promotion policies have been very similar in the South East Mediterranean countries during the last decade. Then, we try to find clubs of convergence in this...

In this paper, we argue that the inadequacy of their underlying formal model can explain the failure of the existing empirical studies to exhibit a robust and convergent estimation of the effect of FDI on growth. We build a structural model of growth with endogenous attraction to FDI, and we...