Volume 17, Issue 1

Countries emerging from armed conflict face tremendous challenges in restoring peace and development. One of the most serious challenges in this regard is mobilizing adequate resources for financing the reconstruction process. In many post-conflict countries, the resort to external financing resources becomes inevitable. This paper aims to understand how conflict intensity shapes the financing modalities in the post-conflict phase. The study uses statistical inference to compare the differences in key financing resources between two groups of post-conflict developing countries with different conflict intensity. The results show that countries severely affected by the conflict rely more heavily on external financing resources compared to countries moderately affected by the conflict. In particular, foreign aid, foreign investments, and external debt were significantly higher in the severely affected countries relative to moderately affected ones. The differences in most external financing resources between the two groups become more obvious when accounting for major income categories differences. The results were robust for different levels of conflict severity.

This paper provides short and long-run estimates of price and income elasticities of Egypt’s natural gas demand using the ARDL bounds testing approach to cointegration over the period 1983–2015. The results show that the long-run income and price elasticities, in absolute values, are greater than their counterparts in the short run. This result is due to the fact that consumers can modify their consumption habits and plans in the long run as a response to changes in the income or the price. Moreover, natural gas demand is more responsive to changes in income than changes in price in both the short and long run. Finally, the study examines the causality relationship between natural gas consumption and economic growth for the gas-consuming sectors in Egypt. The results indicate that there is no causal relationship between the two variables for the electricity, petroleum, and household sectors in the short-run. By contrast, there is a unidirectional causality running from natural gas consumption to the economic activity of the transportation sector and a unidirectional causality running from economic activity to natural gas consumption by the industry sector.