Volume 8, Issue 2

The Gulf Arab countries were promoted as dynamic, rapidly growing and self-transforming economies in the boom years of the 2000s, and were praised for their purported leadership of the MENA regional economy. As of 2010, despite the severity of the financial crisis and recession of 2008-2009 in the Gulf and consequent impact on the rest of the region, the GCC countries were still promoted as potential leaders of both the recovery and future regional development. An examination of the evidence regarding the direction, magnitude and uses of GCC financial flows both domestically and internationally from 2000 to 2010 finds that the investment programs in place in the boom years provided outcomes that only weakly fulfilled these promises and that they barely fulfilled them at all during the economic crisis and recovery. The author’s assessment is that GCC-sourced investment since 2008 mainly addressed the Gulf region’s internal development project, although even that seemed dependent on continued high levels of hydrocarbon revenues, and did little to demonstrate the promised leadership of the regional economy by the GCC.

Egypt is the recipient of sizeable remittance flows sent by the large number of Egyptians working outside their home country. In this paper, we analyze the relationship between these remittances and other macroeconomic variables, taking into account the nonstationary character of these time series. We find that both pull and push factors familiar from the capital flow literature are cointegrated with remittances, but our data do not allow us to clearly distinguish between altruism and other competing motives among the pull factors.

This paper aims to investigate the role of financial development on homeownership and housing in emerging economies. We construct a measure of regional financial development using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances in Turkey. Specifically, we estimate regional effects on the probability that a household does not have access to credit (i.e., are discouraged from applying for credit or their application was denied), and use these estimates to create an indicator of financial development. We find that homeownership increases with financial development in metropolitan areas. Home values, however, increase with financial development in both metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas. Our findings are robust to correction of potential endogeneity of our financial development measure. Our results are also robust to using the variation in the supply of credit across provinces as another measure of financial development.

This paper makes use of a sample of 30,043 mostly unemployed Emiratis and a subsample of 376 employed Emiratis drawn from the Tanmia database to estimate the expected returns to education and experience in the UAE. Overall, we find evidence of a U-shaped relationship between expected wages and education and between expected wages and experience for both males and females, suggesting that the wage expectations of unemployed male and female Emiratis may be too unrealistic and thus could explain the challenges faced in finding suitable employment. It would appear from this study that UAE policymakers face serious challenges in ridding their economy of its reliance on skilled foreign expatriates without playing an active role in linking wages to education and productivity in the public sector.