THE CURSE OF NATURAL RESOURCES, QUALITY OF INSTITUTIONS, AND ECONOMIC GROWTH: THE CASE OF MENA COUNTRIES. By Ahmed Hussein Naser *

There is a big debate among economists, why are the resource-rich economies growing slower than resource-poor economies? Which is making this puzzle more difficult, there are two  groups of resources-rich abundance countries one group grow more than other ones. For instance, the Arabic Gulf, Nigeria, and Venezuela are growing slower than Botswanan, Norway, and Australia, but bo

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Public Sector Reform: A Way Forward for Iraq? By Faisal Al-Suhail

The public sector in Iraq accounts for the majority of employment in the oil-rich country. Plummeting oil prices and the COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in economic crisis and an ever increasing budget deficit. Where there is crisis however, there is opportunity: will 2021 bring a much needed reform of the public sector in Iraq? When the Iraq anti-government protests erupted

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The Dutch Disease and Iraq’s Foreign Exchange Rate. By Dr. Zeki Fattah *

Economists who studied the reasons for the low per capita growth of GDP in developing countries that rely on revenues from abundant natural resources, (called ‘resource curse’), found it was actually caused not by high exchange rates, but by wrongly conceived economic policies over a long period of time. We will visit this point again at the end of the paper. Meanwhile, and unt

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Rentierism Revisited, By Dr. Faleh Abdul Jabar (1946-2018)*

Concepts of rentierism or the rentier state gained wider circulation in political sciences since at least early 1970s, despite its old economic origin. Rent in classical political economy is one of three basic modes of income that coincides with three major factors of production, as laid out by Adam Smith; and these are: Capital = Profit Labor = Wages Land= Rent. Profit and

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