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on MENA - Middle East and North Africa |
| By: | Daniel Camos-Daurella; Antonio Estache; Mohamad M. Hamid |
| Abstract: | The annual electricity investments needed in the Middle East and North Africa region to keep up with demand have been estimated at about 3 percent of the region’s projected gross domestic product. However, in most economies of the region, the ability to make those investments is limited by fiscal and macroeconomic constraints. This paper demonstrates that the solution is readily available: by improving the management and performance of the region’s utilities, more than enough resources could be freed up to make the investments needed. The paper presents the first evaluation of the size and composition of the quasi-fiscal deficit associated with the management of the electricity sector in 14 economies in the Middle East and North Africa region. The estimations are for 2013. They show that the average quasi-fiscal deficit is 4.4 percent of gross domestic product (but goes down to 2.9 percent if Lebanon, Djibouti, Bahrain, and Jordan are excluded). Only five economies have a quasi-fiscal deficit below 3 percent of gross domestic product (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Qatar, and the West Bank), and hence would not be able to finance the average investment requirement through elimination of inefficiencies. For most economies, the main driver of the quasi-fiscal deficit is the underpricing of electricity, which costs on average 3.2 percent of gross domestic product (but 2.2 percent without Lebanon, Djibouti, Bahrain, and Jordan). Commercial inefficiency comes next, at an average cost of 0.6 percent of gross domestic product. Technical and labor inefficiencies represent, respectively, 0.4 and 0.2 percent of gross domestic product. |
| Keywords: | Quasi-fiscal deficit; electricity; utilities; Middle East and North Africa |
| JEL: | H54 H69 L32 L94 L98 |
| Date: | 2017–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eca:wpaper:2013/262380&r=ara |
| By: | Uri Dadush |
| Abstract: | One cannot speak of a common jobs problem across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The countries at war – Syria, Yemen, Libya – are, of course, a story of themselves. Some countries not at war, notably Lebanon and Jordan, have seen huge inflows of refugees that have created large downward pressures on wages, especially in the low-skilled informal sector (Dadush & Niebuhr 2016). The remaining countries can be divided into two main groups. The energy importers such as Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia, have been unable to create sufficient jobs, especially for the young, and are the source of large diasporas. Officially, emigrants are 4-8% of the population and one can probably double that number if undocumented emigrants and the offspring born abroad are included. In contrast, the energy exporters such as Saudi Arabia have generated jobs in excess of their effective labor supply, have little emigration, and attracted foreign workers and their families which add up to some 30% to their native population. The United Arab Emirates and Qatar, oil exporters whose native population is much smaller than that of Saudi Arabia, have foreign born populations that represent as much as 80% of the total. |
| Date: | 2017–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ocp:ppaper:pb-1743&r=ara |
| By: | Aurélien Dasré (Université Paris-Nanterre- Cresppa-GTM)& Institut National d'Etudes Démographiques - INED); Angela Greulich (Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne & Institut National d'Etudes Démographiques - INED); Ceren Inan (French Ministry of Education and Research (SIES)) |
| Abstract: | This paper identifies motors and barriers for combatting domestic violence against women in Turkey – a country where modernism and conservatism are in constant interplay. We combine information from the Demographic Health Surveys and the Turkish Domestic Violence Survey and distinguish between controlling behavior, physical and sexual violence. Our empirical analysis tests how far a woman's intra-household decision making power (as measured by her education, her activity status, her income etc.) bears the potential to reduce her risk of experiencing domestic violence in Turkey. The analysis takes into account contextual factors as well as partner and household characteristics. We find that women's participation in the labor market does not, on its' own, reduce women's risk of experiencing intimate partner violence, but an egalitarian share of economic resources between spouses in likely to protect women against domestic violence. This finding has two important implications: First, higher education enabling women to access formal wage employment allows women not only to gain economic independence, but also to freely choose their partner. Second, unstable economic conditions that harm earning opportunities for men are an important risk factor for couples to experience conflits that can result in domestic violence against women. Against the background of the recent economic crisis that comes hand in hand with a backlash of gender and family norms in Turkey, our results highlight the need of policy action in this field |
| Keywords: | Violence against women; gender; economics |
| JEL: | J1 J12 J16 J18 |
| Date: | 2017–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mse:cesdoc:17052&r=ara |
| By: | Tansel, Aysit; Keskin, Halil Ibrahim |
| Abstract: | The strong relationship between various health indicators and education is widely documented. However, the studies that investigate the nature of causality between these variables became available only recently and provide evidence mostly from developed countries. We add to this literature by studying the causal effect of education on days hospitalized and days out of work for health reasons. We consider two educational reforms. One is the educational expansion of the early 1960s and the other is the 1997 increase in compulsory level of schooling from five to eight years. However, due to the possibility of weak instruments we do not further pursue this avenue. We focus on individuals in two cohorts namely, 1945-1965 which is an older cohort and 1980-1980 which is a younger cohort. We estimate Tobit models as well as Double Hurdle models. The results suggest that an increase in years of education causes to reduce the number of days hospitalized for both men and women unambiguously and the number of days out of work only for men while an increase in education increases the number of days out of work for a randomly selected women. |
| JEL: | I15 J16 J18 C34 C36 |
| Date: | 2017 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:156&r=ara |
| By: | Simplice Asongu (Yaoundé/Cameroun); Jacinta C. Nwachukwu (Coventry University, UK) |
| Abstract: | We model core demands for better governance (political, economic and institutional), more employment and less consumer price inflation using a methodological innovation on the complete elimination of cross-country differences in signals susceptible of sparking social revolts. The empirical evidence based on 14 MENA countries show that the Arab Spring was predictable in 2007 to occur between January 2011 and April 2012. While the findings predict the wave of cross-country revolutions with almost mathematical precision, caveats and cautions are discussed for the scholar to understand the expositional dimensions of the empirics. |
| Keywords: | Arab Spring; Political Instability; Timing; Economic Growth |
| JEL: | N17 O11 O20 O47 P52 |
| Date: | 2017–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:agd:wpaper:17/052&r=ara |
| By: | Ayşe Abbasoğlu Özgören (Department of Demography, Hacettepe University Institute of Population Studies, Ankara, Turkey); Banu Ergöçmen (Department of Demography, Hacettepe University Institute of Population Studies, Ankara, Turkey); Aysıt Tansel (Department of Economics, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey; Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) Bonn, Germany; Economic Research Forum (ERF) Cairo, Egypt) |
| Abstract: | The relationship between fertility and employment among women is a challenging topic that requires further exploration, especially for developing countries where the micro and macro evidence fails to paint a clear picture. This study analyzes the two-way relationship between women’s employment and fertility in Turkey using a hazard approach with piece-wise constant exponential modelling, using data from the 2008 Turkey Demographic and Health Survey. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that makes use of an event history analysis to analyze this relationship within a developing country context. Specifically, a separate analysis is made of the association between the employment statuses of women in their first, second, third, and fourth and higher order conceptions, and the association of fertility and its various dimensions with entry and exit from employment. The findings suggest that a two-way negative association exists between fertility and employment among women in Turkey, with increasing intensities identified among some groups of women. Our findings also cast light on how contextual changes related to the incompatibility of the roles of worker and mother have transformed the fertility-employment relationship in Turkey, in line with propositions of the role incompatibility hypothesis. |
| Keywords: | Fertility, Employment, Women, Event History Analysis, Turkey. |
| JEL: | C41 J13 J16 |
| Date: | 2017–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:met:wpaper:1716&r=ara |
| By: | Ceren Baysan |
| Abstract: | Many claim that increased availability of information via both old and new media drives political polarization, possibly undermining democratic institutions. However, rigorous evidence on this topic remains limited. I address this gap by conducting two experiments during a recent Turkish referendum that was on an important institutional change to weaken constraints on the executive. First, I designed a randomized door-to-door campaign. In this campaign, the opposition party gave uniform information on poor economic performance and increased terrorist activity under the incumbent's leadership to more than 130,000 voters. I show that voters, despite receiving the same information, diverged further in their vote choice on aggregate, leading to a significant increase in ideological polarization. The result is consistent with a model where polarization in vote choice is driven by differences in reaction to the same information and not self-segregation to different information sources, as others have assumed. The opposition failed to increase its vote share in this campaign, on aggregate, because it lacked the necessary data to target the subset of constituents that interpreted the information in their favor. In a second experiment with politicians, I confirm that the opposition had inadequate data on voters relative to the incumbent based on an analysis of roughly one million of their tweets. The evidence from both experiments, taken together, suggests that the incumbent party can exploit its access to higher quality data on voters to maintain its grip on power and advance an agenda that weakens democratic checks and balances. |
| JEL: | D80 D83 D72 P26 |
| Date: | 2017–12–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:jmp:jm2017:pba1551&r=ara |
| By: | Bichler, Shimshon; Nitzan, Jonathan |
| Abstract: | This research note updates selected charts from three previous papers. The new data present a rather startling picture, suggesting that the Middle East – and the global political economy more generally – might face an important crossroads. Our assessment here rests on the analysis of capital as power, or CasP. Beginning in the late 1980s, we suggested that, since the late 1960s, the Middle East was greatly influenced by the capitalized power of a Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition – a loose coalition comprising the leading oil companies, the OPEC cartel, armament contractors, engineering firms and large financial institutions – whose differential accumulation benefitted from and in turn helped fuel and sustain Middle East ‘energy conflicts’. These conflicts, we argued, reverberated far beyond the region: they affected the ups and downs of global growth, the gyrations of inflation and, in some important respects, the very evolution of the capitalist mode of power. And this impact, it seems to us, is now being called into question. |
| Keywords: | conflict,differential accumulation,energy,Middle East |
| Date: | 2017 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:esprep:172198&r=ara |
| By: | Ayşe Abbasoğlu Özgören (Department of Demography, Hacettepe University Institute of Population Studies, Ankara, Turkey); Banu Ergöçmen (Department of Demography, Hacettepe University Institute of Population Studies, Ankara, Turkey); Aysit Tansel (Middle East Technical University, ERF & IZA) |
| Abstract: | The relationship between fertility and employment among women is a challenging topic that requires further exploration, especially for developing countries where the micro and macro evidence fails to paint a clear picture. This study analyzes the two-way relationship between women’s employment and fertility in Turkey using a hazard approach with piece-wise constant exponential modelling, using data from the 2008 Turkey Demographic and Health Survey. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that makes use of an event history analysis to analyze this relationship within a developing country context. Specifically, a separate analysis is made of the association between the employment statuses of women in their first, second, third, and fourth and higher order conceptions, and the association of fertility and its various dimensions with entry and exit from employment. The findings suggest that a two-way negative association exists between fertility and employment among women in Turkey, with increasing intensities identified among some groups of women. Our findings also cast light on how contextual changes related to the incompatibility of the roles of worker and mother have transformed the fertility-employment relationship in Turkey, in line with propositions of the role incompatibility hypothesis. |
| Date: | 2017 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tek:wpaper:2017/8&r=ara |
| By: | Joaquin Iglesias; Alvaro Ortiz; Tomasa Rodrigo |
| Abstract: | We apply the natural language processing or computational linguistics (NLP) to the analysis of the communication policy (i.e statements and minutes) of the Central Bank of Turkey (CBRT). While previous literature has focused on Developed countries, we extend the NLP analysis to the Central Banks of the Emerging Markets using the Dynamic Topic Modelling approach. |
| Keywords: | Working Paper , Central Banks , Digital economy , Economic Analysis , Emerging Economies , Turkey |
| JEL: | E52 E58 |
| Date: | 2017–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bbv:wpaper:1724&r=ara |