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on MENA - Middle East and North Africa |
| By: | Demircioglu, Emre |
| Abstract: | This study is conducted to investigate the CAPM (Capital Asset Pricing Model) in Turkey based on the sources of information from Istanbul Stock exchange emphasizing only on the Cement Sector and Power Generation & Distribution Sector. The data range is from 1st January 2012 to 31st December 2013. In the Cement Sector we get data for 10 companies and in the Power Generation and Distribution we get data for 10 companies. The consequences are only substantial for only mention stocks and only for few years. This paper shows the relationship between the Coefficients Beta ( ) and Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) of the Cement Sector and Power Generation and Distribution Sector in Turkey and then get regression analysis of Coefficients Beta ( ) and Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) both of the sector shows In-significant result, which means the Capital Assets Pricing Model (CAPM) is not applicable in Turkey Cement Sector and Power Generation and Distribution Sector. |
| Keywords: | Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), Coefficients Beta, Regression |
| JEL: | C40 G38 |
| Date: | 2015–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:61392&r=ara |
| By: | Thabet, Chokri; Chebil, Ali; Frija, Aymen |
| Abstract: | The main objective of this study is to compare the impacts of alternative water policy management scenarios on Tunisia and Morocco. A dynamic water CGE-model has been implemented and used to explore the likely effects of water economic instruments. Results show that the low cost of water has encouraged farmers to adopt more water-intensive activities. Reducing public subsidies on water will affect directly farm income which is expected to drop by about 20 per cent in the short and medium terms. However, the reduction of farmers’ incomes will be largely compensated by the saving in public expenditures but also in a better and more efficient use of water resources. |
| Keywords: | agriculture, water pricing, CGE model, Tunisia and Morocco, Food Security and Poverty, Public Economics, |
| Date: | 2014–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:eaae14:183088&r=ara |
| By: | Ben Jebli, Mehdi; Ben Youssef, Slim |
| Abstract: | We use the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach for cointegration with structural breaks and the vector error correction model (VECM) Granger causality approach in order to investigate relationships between per capita CO2 emissions, GDP, renewable and non-renewable energy consumption and international trade (exports or imports) for Tunisia during the period 1980-2009. We show the existence of a short-run unidirectional causality running from trade, GDP, CO2 emission and non-renewable energy to renewable energy. Our long-run estimates show that non-renewable energy and trade have a positive impact on CO2 emissions, whereas renewable energy impacts weakly and negatively CO2 emission when using the model with exports and this impact is statistically insignificant when using the model with imports. The inverted U-shaped environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis is not supported graphically and analytically in the long-run. This means that Tunisia has not yet reached the required level of per capita GDP to get an inverted U-shaped EKC. Our main policy recommendations for Tunisia are the following: (i) to radically reform the subsidies system granted by the Tunisian government for fossil fuels consumption; (ii) to encourage the use of renewable energy and energy efficiency by reinforcing actual projects and regulatory framework; (iii) to locate ports near exporting industrial zones (or vice versa) to reduce emission of pollution caused by the transport of merchandise; (iv) to elaborate a strategy for maximizing its benefit from renewable energy technology transfer occurring when importing capital goods; (v) to encourage the creation of renewable energy projects for export to the EU with a proportion of production for national consumption. |
| Keywords: | Environmental Kuznets curve; Renewable and non-renewable energy; International trade; Autoregressive distributed lag; Tunisia. |
| JEL: | C22 F14 Q42 Q43 Q54 |
| Date: | 2015–01–13 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:61282&r=ara |
| By: | Tim Callen; Reda Cherif; Fuad Hasanov; Amgad Hegazy; Padamja Khandelwal |
| Abstract: | Abstract: The economies of the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries are heavily reliant on oil. Greater economic diversification would reduce their exposure to volatility and uncertainty in the global oil market, help create jobs in the private sector, increase productivity and sustainable growth, and help create the non-oil economy that will be needed in the future when oil revenues start to dwindle. The GCC countries have followed many of the standard policies that are usually thought to promote more diversified economies, including reforms to improve the business climate, the development of domestic infrastructure, financial deepening, and improvements in education. Nevertheless, success to date has been limited. This paper argues that increased diversification will require realigning incentives for firms and workers in the economies—fixing these incentives is the “missing link†in the GCC countries’ diversification strategies. At present, producing non-tradables is less risky and more profitable for firms as they can benefit from the easy availability of low-wage foreign labor and the rapid growth in government spending, while the continued availability of high-paying and secure public sector jobs discourages nationals from pursuing entrepreneurship and private sector employment. Measures to begin to address these incentive issues could include limiting and reorienting government spending, strengthening private sector competition, providing guarantees and financial support for those firms engaged in export activity, and implementing labor market reforms to make nationals more competitive for private sector employment. |
| Keywords: | Export diversification;Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf;Oil revenues;Nonoil sector;Production incentives;Private sector;Wages and employment;Economic growth;Cross country analysis;Diversification, growth, exports, GCC |
| Date: | 2014–12–23 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfsdn:14/12&r=ara |
| By: | Simplice Asongu (Yaoundé/Cameroun); Jacinta C. Nwachukwu (Huddersfield, HD1 3DH, UK) |
| Abstract: | The paper examines whether the Arab Spring phenomenon was predictable by complete elimination in the dispersion of core demands for better governance, more jobs and stable consumer prices. A methodological innovation of the Generalized Methods of Moments is employed to assess the feasibility and timing of the revolution. The empirical evidence reveals that from a projection date of 2007, the Arab Spring was foreseeable between 2011 and 2012. The paper contributes at the same time to the empirics of predicting revolutions and the scarce literature on modeling the future of socio-economic events. Caveats and cautions are discussed. |
| Keywords: | Arab Spring; Political Instability; Timing; Economic Growth |
| JEL: | N17 O11 O20 O47 P52 |
| Date: | 2014–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:agd:wpaper:14/032&r=ara |
| By: | Onur Altindag (Ph.D Program in Economics, Graduate Center, CUNY) |
| Abstract: | Son preference is usually revealed by both gender discrimination in relative care and son-targeting fertility stopping rules. This article shows that couples in Turkey exhibit strong son preference without causing a gender imbalance in the population. Estimation results reveal that a first-born daughter increases the average sibship size by 6.6 percent through male-biased differential stopping fertility behavior. Contraceptive use is the primary tool to halt fertility following a male birth among young couples. Families with a highly educated mother are much less likely to seek sons, while father's education has no association with the degree of son preference. The differential demand for sons is persistent despite economic development and decline in fertility predicted by more schooling, higher age at first birth and urbanization along with other endogenous determinants. The relationship between degree of son preference and fertility follows an inverse U-shaped path reaching a peak at the medium fertility level. |
| Keywords: | Son preference, Differential stopping behavior, Fertility |
| JEL: | J13 I15 J10 |
| Date: | 2015–01–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cgc:wpaper:005&r=ara |
| By: | Tansel, Aysit; Ozdemir, Zeynel / A. |
| Abstract: | Informality is a salient feature of labor market in Egypt as it is the case with many developing countries. This is the first study of the determinants of worker transitions between various labor market states using panel data from Egypt. We first provide a diagnosis of dynamic worker flows across different labor market states. We develop transition probabilities by gender across different labor market states utilizing Markov transition processes. Next we identify the effects of individual, household, job characteristics and location on different mobility patterns by estimating a multinomial logit regression. The results point to the highly static nature of the Egyptian labor market. Government employment and the out of labor force are the most persistent labor market states. Further, only a few of the explanatory variables except high levels of education are found to have predictive power in explaining the transitions from formal wage, informal wage, self-employment, unemployment government employment and out of labor market states. |
| Keywords: | Labor market dynamics, informality, Markov processes, multinomial logit, Egypt |
| JEL: | J21 J24 J6 |
| Date: | 2014–11–15 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:61183&r=ara |
| By: | Brockmeyer, Anne; Khatrouch, Maha; Raballand, Gael |
| Abstract: | This paper examines public sector size and performance management in post-revolution Tunisia, drawing on macro-empirical, legal, and qualitative analyses. The paper first shows that public sector employment figures and the wage bill have increased significantly since the 2011 revolution, but that this represents merely an acceleration of the previous trend. The paper then examines de jure and de facto performance management in Tunisia's public sector, covering incentives through recruitment, evaluation, compensation, and promotion. The examination shows that Tunisia's legal framework is well-designed for recruiting the most skilled candidates into the public sector and promoting the most high-performing employees. De facto, the link between an employee's performance and evaluation, compensation, and promotion is weak. Performance evaluation is virtually nonexistent and promotions are automatic or awarded through a process that emphasizes seniority over performance. This is particularly true during the post-revolution period, in which a number of ad-hoc arrangements multiplied divergences between the legal basis for performance management and its application. These ad-hoc changes allowed the state to act as employer of last resort, significantly increasing direct (noncompetitive) recruitment and regularizing temporary staff. The increase in and proliferation of allowances have added to the complexity of the compensation system. In a qualitative review of past reform attempts, the paper demonstrates that reformers had identified the weaknesses of Tunisia's public sector performance system as early as 1989, but failed to achieve major change. |
| Keywords: | Labor Markets,Public Sector Economics,Labor Management and Relations,Public Sector Management and Reform,Tertiary Education |
| Date: | 2015–01–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:7159&r=ara |
| By: | Ali, Hoda Abd El Hamid |
| Abstract: | This paper explores the role of industrial clusters in the development of the Egyptian universities & research institutes (URIs), and economic performance. The study hypothesizes that the large industrial clusters in Egypt are old and traditional, and have weak impact on URIs, and economic performance. To this end, we examine Egypt regions where that contain long-existing and traditional industrial clusters are compared to all other regions. The analysis is conducted separately for seven industries, and by using a Mann-Whitney U test and a spearman correlation we find that the more recent and technical industrial clusters in Egypt have a positive and significant impact on URIs , but they have a weak impact on economic performance. The Egyptian experience suggests that the most important contribution of clusters to URIS is one in which corporations contribute money to universities, or enter in to informal consulting arrangements with a professor, neither of which typically of professional patent applications or even through the mobility of university graduates. |
| Keywords: | Egypt, universities and research institutes, clusters, National innovation system, and development |
| JEL: | O1 O12 O14 O3 |
| Date: | 2100 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:60111&r=ara |
| By: | Dhaoui, Elwardi |
| Abstract: | At the micro level, economists seek to understand and interpret the decision making process of individuals for investment in human capital, as well as the many factors that can influence this process. On the other hand, the economics of education is concerned with the impacts of individual choices on trends in the labor market. This paper try to find an implementation of a new estimate of the rate of return to education with the incorporation of new variables in the Mincerian model in the context of segmented labor market applied to the case of Tunisia. This study was supported by a questionnaire with one hundred individuals of the Tunisian workforce that was developed during the months of January and February 2012. |
| Keywords: | Level of education; Income; Formal sector; Informal sector; Rate of return to education; Earnings |
| JEL: | J31 J45 |
| Date: | 2015–01–13 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:61292&r=ara |
| By: | Karartı, Tuncay |
| Abstract: | The effects of the ownership structure on the performance of a firm has been widely discussed in the past literature; however, the relationship between ownership structure and capital structure is not much examined. Those that discuss this issue are mostly conducted in developed countries due to the availability of the business sector data. The aim of this study is to focus on whether the ownership structure can help in explaining the variation of capital structure in developing countries, the case of Turkey. In this study, with a comprehensive literature review, the empirical evidence is used through theoretical framework. The analysis of the study is divided into three parts. First, the negative relationship between managerial ownership and capital structure. Second, the impact of ownership concentration (large shareholding) on debt/equity ratio. Last, the impact of both managerial ownership and external block holders on leverage. |
| Keywords: | ownership structure, capital structure, leverge of non-financial firms. |
| JEL: | G10 |
| Date: | 2014–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:61483&r=ara |
| By: | Farhang, Shimon |
| Abstract: | The study purposes are: to understand and establish a link between various cross-border infrastructure (CBI) phenomena around the world by exposing their true implications and by presenting ways by which decision-making and practice of CBI development, can be influenced; To propose a new interpretative paradigm for processes in the Middle East and their impact on development of the region; To propose a new practice for changing courses of action in the development of CBI. CBI development is a result of regional thinking and territorial cooperation which aims strengthening the socio-economic and regional integration between two countries or more, while protecting the common interests and coping with obstacles existing in the process of developing and implementing CBI. The economic contribution of CBI (JICA, 2009): Enhancing regional connectivity, reducing trading costs, moderating economic gaps between neighboring regions, improving utilization efficiency, fostering comprehensive economic growth, poverty reduction, developing regional integration by eliminating or moderating regulation barriers. Dissertation presents two essential conclusions to bridge over gaps between CBI project partners: • Build mutual trust and consensus, based on three important elements: confidential negotiations at the beginning of the process, local initiative based process, joint Strategic Plan as a platform for mutual trust • "Lifeline" Strategy - Developing interdependence on the existence of CBI corridor vital to all partners. Formulating a critical mass of interests, powerful and significant to all Shareholders, that turns the lifeline corridor essential to all. |
| Keywords: | cross-border infrastructure, regional integration, economic growth, mutual trust. |
| JEL: | Y80 |
| Date: | 2014–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:61485&r=ara |
| By: | Ozan Eksi (TOBB Ekonomi ve Teknoloji Üniversitesi, İktisat Bölümü, 06560, Ankara, Turkey); Murat G. Kırdar (DBoğaziçi Üniversitesi, İktisat Bölümü, 34342, İstanbul, Turkey) |
| Abstract: | Bu çalışmada Türkiye’de saatlik ücret ve yıllık emek gelirindeki değişimler ve bu değişimlerin bireyler arasında meydana getirdiği eşitsizlikler 2002–2011 dönemi için yıllık veri kullanılarak ortaya konulmuştur. 2002–2011 döneminde kentte yaşayan 25 ile 49 yaşları arasındaki erkekler için medyan saatlik ücret reel olarak %34, medyan yıllık emek geliri ise reel olarak %43 oranında artmıştır. Dolayısıyla, bahsi geçen demografik grup için yıllık emek gelirindeki artış, bu dönemde gerçekleşen kişi başı reel GSYİH’deki artışı (%41) yakalarken, saatlik ücretteki artış ise daha geride kalmıştır. 2002 ile 2005 yılları arasında hem saatlik ücret eşitsizliği hem de yıllık emek geliri eşitsizliği azalmış; 2005 sonrasında ise saatlik ücret eşitsizliğindeki azalma dururken, yıllık emek gelirindeki eşitsizlik artmıştır. Bunun nedeni ise, toplam yıllık çalışma saatinin varyansının ve yıllık çalışma saati ile saatlik ücret arasındaki kovaryansın artmasıdır. İktisadi açıdan bakıldığında ise, 2002–2005 döneminde yıllık emek gelirindeki eşitsizliğin azalması, aynı dönemde asgari ücretin önemli oranda artmış olmasıyla ilintilidir. Dolayısıyla da düşük eğitim grupları için, diğer eğitim gruplarına kıyasla, 2002–2005 döneminde yıllık emek gelirindeki artış daha yüksek olmuştur. Takip eden 2005–2011 döneminde ise tam tersine üniversite mezunlarının yıllık emek geliri daha çok artmıştır ki, bu durum üniversite mezunlarının arzında diğer eğitim gruplarına kıyasla meydana gelen artışa rağmen gerçekleşmiştir. |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tek:wpaper:2015/02&r=ara |