Modern economic theories explain differences in productivity and economic growth across countries by differences in political and economic institutions, and differences in culture, geographical location, policies, and laws. The success of any of these theories in explaining the gap in...

I argue that state-ownership and state-management of oil on behalf of the Iraqi people is not conducive to democracy and inconsistent with the principles of free market. I also argue that it can adversely affect economic development and might further impoverish the average Iraqi citizen. To...

We confront microeconomic theory with macroeconomic data. Unemployment results from two main micro-level decisions of workers and firms. Most of the efficiency wage and bargaining theories predict that over the business cycle, unemployment falls below its natural rate when the worker’s real...

We use the work-leisure choice model to compute equilibrium weekly hours worked for a number of Arab countries, where actual statistics are unavailable. We show that the labor supply curve is elastic in all Arab countries, and provide a new measure of labor productivity. This finding confirms...

A persistent increase in the unemployment rate ignites speculations about whether the changes to unemployment are structural or cyclical. The New Zealand economy has been through major restructuring since the mid-1980s. The labour market's institutional changes were the last in the sequence of...

I extend the Glick and Rogoff (1995) aggregate time-series, empirical, intertemporal model of country-investment (and the current account) to a sectoral-level, and estimate it for New Zealand. I fit the model to panel data of eleven industries from 1988-2009. The sectoral-level investment growth...

We use a variety of nonparametric test statistics to evaluate the inflation- targeting regimes of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden and the UK. We argue that a sensible approach of evaluation must rely on a variety of methods, among them parametric and nonparametric econometric methods, for...

Essentially, the impact of the currency union on member countries depends on whether the common currency area is optimal in the sense that the effect of the asymmetric shocks is small, Mundell (1961). Typically, researchers use VAR of different types to analyze the data. For robustness, we use...

The Economic Research Forum (ERF) produced a one-off survey of micro & small private enterprises (MSE) in a number of Middle East and North African countries (MENA). It contains sufficient information to fit a production function and additional information about the owner’s education type; the...

In addition to the wide believed positive effects on growth, employment and wages, FDIs are often perceived as sources of funds for development. Developing countries, especially low income and emerging economies, welcome FDIs because of their favorable budgetary implications. All that resulted...