Official estimates are that Iraq’s proven reserves of conventional natural gas amount to at least 3.5 trillion cubic meters (tcm), or about 1.5 percent of the world’s total, placing Iraq 13th among global reserve-holders, with around three-quarters of this figure comprising associated gas that is found in the same reservoirs as oil. The International Energy Agency, though, esti
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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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Six years passed since the Iraqi government launched its Private Sector Development Strategy 2014-2030, aiming to reform regulatory frames and market conditions towards private sector-led growth. Several international partners (including UNDP, World Bank, GIZ, and USAID) also attempted to help realize some goals of the strategy. Along with the strategy, Iraqi leaders have alway
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This paper aims to show that Iraq’s high population growth is posing a serious problem for its economic development. Its high population growth is driven by a high fertility rate caused by a number of unfavorable socioeconomic conditions that need to be addressed urgently. The population growth is not uniform across the country, and steps should be taken to reinforce the trend
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At the beginning Sumer (a region of Mesopotamia) was the birthplace of writing, the wheel, agriculture, the arch, the plow, the saw, irrigation, beer, the spear, money, calendar and many other innovations, and is often referred to as the Cradle of Civilization. The Sumerians developed the earliest known writing system – a pictographic writing system known as cuneiform script,
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