In Iraqi folklore, Saturday is both an ominous and auspicious day. Iraqis say it is Awwad —“repetitive” — and hence they prefer to postpone taking important decisions to other days of the week. For many Iraqis this week, the news of Dr. Sinan al-Shabibi’s unfortunate passing on Saturday, Jan. 8 could not have come on a worse day. While the loss of one of Iraq’s last firmly inde
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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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1. Introduction On May 19, 2020 Alaa al-Deen Ja’far (henceforth A. Ja’far) published an article entitled ‘Choice of zero ‘interest price’ to face the current deflation in Iraq.’ [1] Much of the article’s text comprises extracts from A. Ja'far’s 2011 book, [2] which is not included in the article’s references. The extracts are stated verbatim, with minor cosmetic
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1. Introduction [1] The purpose of this note is to shed light, and comment, on two views expressed recently in relation to the appreciation of the Iraq Dinar (IQD) in 2006-2008. Muhammad Tawfiq Alawi (henceforth M. Alawi), former minister of communications in Iraq, gave a talk on December 13, 2019 in Washington D.C. to an Iraqi audience, in which he
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For the full paper, including 2 appendices, click PDF file. Introduction Misconduct charges against the Central Bank of Iraq (CBI) and banking system, before and after the replacement of the Governor in October 2012, have included two groups. The first relates to possible ‘misuse’ of CBI’s foreign exchange auction sales by banks, favouritism in allocating sales, and money lau
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