Technology, Political Economy, and Economic Development in the Middle East and North Africa

Brach Juliane
Additional contact information
Brach Juliane: University of Copenhagen and German Institute of Global and Area Studies

Review of Middle East Economics and Finance, 2010, vol. 5, issue 3, 1-23

Abstract: Comparing the pace and extent of economic development across the developing regions yields that Arab countries have displaced a weak economic performance over the past 20 years, despite their favorable geo-strategic location and a high density of national and international structural adjustment efforts. Using cross-country regressions, this paper identifies two binding constraints to economic development in the Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA): 1) Most countries are not able to apply or adopt existing technologies efficiently and 2) The economically inefficient allocation of resources is rooted deeply in regional political economy structures. These results challenge the scholarly debate, but can help to understand why international structural adjustment programs that focused on privatization and trade liberalization only showed limited success in the MENA region.

Keywords: economic development; technological capacities; political economy; Middle East and North Africa (MENA); Arab countries (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2202/1475-3693.1240 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:rmeecf:v:5:y:2010:i:3:n:1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/rmeef/html

DOI: 10.2202/1475-3693.1240

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Middle East Economics and Finance is currently edited by Ghassan Dibeh

More articles in Review of Middle East Economics and Finance from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().