Middle East Development Journal 

About: Middle East Development Journal is an academic journal published by Taylor & Francis. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Unemployment & Productivity. It has an ISSN identifier of 1793-8120. Over the lifetime, 214 publications have been published receiving 2124 citations. The journal is also known as: Publication of the Economic Research Forum & MEDJ.

Industrial policy: don't ask why, ask how

Abstract: The theoretical case for industrial policy is a strong one. The market failures which industrial policies target — in markets for credit, labor, products, and knowledge — have long been at the core...

Trade openness and co2 emissions in tunisia

Abstract: By reallocating resources among more or less polluting sectors, trade reforms affect pollution levels directly. They also affect pollution indirectly through their impact on economic activity and income levels, which then affect not only emissions, but also the demand for higher environmental standards. The sign of the direct and indirect effects is ambiguous. In other words, whether trade openness leads to more or less pollution is an empirical question. Using cointegration techniques, we disentangle the long- and short-run relationship between trade openness, income per capita and CO2 emissions in Tunisia, as well as the extent of Granger causality among these variables. Results suggest that the direct effect of trade openness on CO2 emissions is positive both in the short and the long run, but the indirect effect is negative at least in the long run. The overall effect is positive both in the short and long run, highlighting the importance for trade reforms to be accompanied by strong environmental pol...

A comparative study of returns to education of urban men in egypt, iran, and turkey

Abstract: This paper presents a comparative study of private returns to schooling of urban men in Egypt, Iran, and Turkey using similar survey data and a uniform methodology. We employ three surveys for each country that span nearly two decades, from the 1980s to 2006, and, to increase the comparability of the estimates across surveys, we focus on urban men 20–54 years old and in full time wage and salary employment. Our aim is to learn how the monetary signals of rewards that guide individual decisions to invest in education are shaped by the institutions of education and labor markets in these countries. Our estimates generally support the stylized facts of the institutions of education and labor markets in Middle Eastern countries. Their labor markets have been described as dominated by the public sector and therefore relatively inflexible, and their education systems as more focused on secondary and tertiary degrees than teaching practical and productive skills. Returns in all countries are increasing in years ...

Income Inequality in the Arab Region: Data and Measurement, Patterns and Trends

Abstract: This paper provides a review of empirical knowledge about income inequality in the Arab region, focusing primarily on the issues of data and measurement, and the characterization of its patterns and trends. The review shows good progress in the availability of data and quality of measurement. However, the region remains far behind progress being achieved worldwide in terms of coverage and comparability across countries, improvements in quality and content of data, and, more importantly, accessibility of available micro-data to scholars. Within these data constraints and limitations, the available evidence shows moderately high levels of inequality in terms of household expenditure compared to other regions of the world. The patterns of inequality show quite significant variation across countries. One striking result is the weak time variability of the inequality indexes in most of the countries of the region. Alternative measures of welfare distribution such as of horizontal inequality, polarization or in...

Understanding revolution in the middle east: the central role of the middle class

Abstract: The paper presents the outlines of a coherent, structural, long term account of the socio-economic and political evolution of the Arab republics that can explain both the persistence of autocracy until 2011, and the its eventual collapse, in a way that is empirically verifiable. I argue that the changing interests of the middle class would have to be a central aspect of a coherent story, on accounts of both distributional and modernization considerations, and that the ongoing transformation can be best understood in terms of their defection from the autocratic order to a new democratic order, which is still in formation. I then review what the evidence says in two central parts of the emerging narrative, for the case of Egypt: first, by looking directly at changes in opinion and asking whether these are consistent with the predictions of the theory. And second, by examining the corporate sector before and during the uprisings of 2011 in order to understand better the performance of “crony capitalism”, and...