Volume 7, Issue 1

The transition from an oil-based to a knowledge-based economy requires that the population dramatically increases its level of human capital. This paper examines ways to achieve that transition in Saudi Arabia. It argues that massive public investment in education is not sufficient since non-cognitive skills are a bottleneck in the process of building human capital. In order to strengthen those skills, a set of reforms is proposed. The core of the proposal is the introduction of a social inheritance to each Saudi citizen reaching adult age, the SSGY.

This paper examines the determinants of the female labor force and the impact of female labor on the growth rates of six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Using per capita spending on imported US books to approximate for western cultural sentiment, the paper finds a positive relationship between the female percentage of total labor and per capita U.S. book expenditures. The estimates suggest that an increase in western cultural sentiment equivalent to an additional $1 per person spent on U.S. books would raise the female percentage of total labor by 1.5 percent in a given GCC country. In fact, the female percentage of total labor can account for approximately 1.6 percent of the variation in growth rates between the GCC countries over time. Moreover, a 1 percent increase in the female percentage of total labor creates GDP growth equivalent to a 2 percent increase in the international price of oil.

While previous studies have provided some evidence that energy prices have impact on stock returns across industries, to the best of our knowledge, it is surprising that no recent work is known about the Iran’s emerging stock market. However, the published daily data on Tehran’s industry stock indices since 2005 make such a study possible. Therefore, our study is considered very beneficial as it provides insights regarding information transmission and volatility estimation of oil and gas prices and Iranian industry equity returns. The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of oil and gas prices on Iranian industry stock returns. To this end, we analyze 35 Iranian industry indices for the period from January 2005 to March 2010. Based on the multifactor model and using time-series regressions, our findings indicate that oil prices are an important determinant of returns in the banks, credit and other financial institutions, basic metals, electric machinery and apparatus and refined petroleum products and nuclear fuel industries. The findings also suggest that gas price movements do not seem to play a role for Iranian industry stock returns except for motor vehicles and auto parts industry. Moreover, consistent with the capital asset pricing model (CAPM), the market portfolio is a significant pricing factor in most of the (studied) industry stock returns. The results of this study help domestic and potential foreign investors to understand the effect of energy price changes on Iranian industry stock returns in order to manage their portfolios effectively.

In this article, we investigate technical trading rules using data from the Abu Dhabi stock market. Empirical evidence shows that technical rules have predictive power and can discern recurring price patterns in the Abu Dhabi stock market, which suggests that traders can exploit this predictive power and design profitable strategies to beat the buy and hold strategy even after considering transaction costs.

A sample of 21 privatized and IPO Saudi firms has been examined in this paper. Consistent with the relative literature on privatization and IPOs, we have documented two contrasting outcomes. First, we found that Saudi State Owned Enterprises SOEs and the private joint stock companies are showing a large improvement after-IPO as compared to the pre-IPO financial performance. On the contrary, we found a financial performance deterioration among the family owned businesses or the limited liability type of firms after the IPO compared to the pre-IPO level as measured by the return on assets (ROA) and return on sales (ROS).