DAY 1 - The 18th Annual Conference of the Arab Society for Economic Research

There is no doubt that the ascension of China, which is at the centre of the global debate, is the most relevant fact of the 21st century. A rising power with many vulnerabilities, yet a clear understanding of what they are and with the willingness to actively reduce them to a minimum, manageable level. China has managed to become, after all, the second largest economy in the world, with outstanding economic performance. Globalisation has brought China from the periphery into the co ...

L’analyse des mutations qu’a connues l’économie marocaine après la crise économique et financière de 2008, offre l’opportunité d‘évaluer l’orientation des politiques macroéconomiques gérées dans un contexte relativement difficile, mettant à l’épreuve les décideurs publics en matière de politique économique et leur engagement à préserver la stabilité du cadre macroéconomique. Un diagnostic approfondi revient à apprécier la pertinence des choix de politiques macroéconomiques par rappo ...

Has the integration of European, North American and Asian natural gas markets been fostered over the last few years by growing LNG export capacities and an increasing market share of spot transactions? This is the key question that this article sets out to answer. For this purpose, we develop bivariate error correction models with structural breaks and asymmetric responses among gas references prices, oil prices, and coal prices. We use daily prices of all reference prices spanning ...

This article was originally published on Center for Macroeconomics and development's website Friday night, US President Donald Trump announced by Twitter that he would suspend the implementation of tariffs on Mexican imports, which would start with 5% on Monday, June 10, to reach 25% in October. A signed agreement between the two countries, also confirmed by Twitter by Mexico’s foreign minister Marcelo Ebrard, would have included Mexican government’s commitments to take “strong mea ...

This paper estimates the socioeconomic impacts of the emergence and expansion of e-hailing services in São Paulo, Brazil. Combining data from a major service provider, individual level data from a representative travel diary survey and a structural traffic network simulation, we evaluate the impact of e-hailing on commuters' travel time and accessibility. We then estimate the effect of these changes on workers' productivity. Finally, using a Spatial Computable General Equilibrium (S ...

In a recent brief, titled” The Crisis in World Trade”, my co-authors and I conclude that whether we still have a rules-based system a few years from now depends on the answer to three questions: Can the WTO be revitalized? Is protectionism in the United States a temporary aberration? Will China reform and fit the liberal economic order? If the answer to these three questions is yes, the system will likely endure. If the answer is no, we will return to the power based non system that ...

This paper empirically examines the impact of exchange rate arrangements on current account imbalances within the African context. Following Friedman’s hypothesis (Friedman, 1953), we test the propositions stating that flexible exchange rate regimes limit the magnitude of real external shocks and permit smoother adjustments of external imbalances. Using a new de facto exchange rate regime classification, we employ two empirical methodologies to test this hypothesis: we first apply a ...

The world economy has gone through several systems to determine a value between country’s currencies. After the Second World War and the so-called gold standards, major world economies engaged into a system of fixed exchange rate of currencies against the dollar and, the whole system was backed by the value of USD against gold. After the end of that mechanism known as the Bretton Wood system in the 1970s, major world economies decided to liberalize the system of international exchan ...

The world trading system has been remarkably successful in many respects but is presently under tremendous strain. The causes are deep-seated and require a strategic response. The future of the system depends critically on reinvigorating the WTO and policy change in the largest trading nations. Important measures are required to sustain the multilateral trading system, and urgent action is needed to avoid a scenario where the system fragments. The worst scenarios will disrupt global ...