1st CRECC Seminar
1st CRECC Seminar
Date
October 18th, 2019
Time
03:00 PM to 04:30 PM
Venue
Room 1. 09 (1st floor) - Paris School of Business
Location
59 rue Nationale, Paris, FRANCE
“Oil revenues, growth and political institutions in the MENA region: Is there a resource curse?”
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to investigate whether oil revenues in the MENA region affect economic growth or alternatively find no evidence of the resource curse. To do so we employ a panel Vector Auto-Regressive (PVAR) model comprising not only the economic growth and oil revenues but also the government expenditures. The latter variable is considered so as to examine whether the oil revenues lead to economic growth via the fiscal policy channel. We further assess whether heterogeneous findings exist depending on the quality of the political institutions of the MENA countries. Finally, countries are also classified in the different income groupings to assess whether this has an impact on the link between oil revenues and economic growth. Our preliminary findings show that both the quality of the political institutions and the income level are important in explaining the oil revenue-economic growth relationship.
Guest speaker
Associate Professor of Economics and the Director of the Institute of Financial Economics at the American University of Beirut (AUB). She previously chaired the Department of Economics at AUB, and has been an adjunct lecturer at the George Washington University since 2016. Dr. Dagher’s research is at the nexus of energy, environment, and economics. Using econometrics tools and especially time-series econometrics, she studies various aspects of the environmental and energy sectors and their relationship to the economy. Her research is frequently presented at international conferences such as the ASSA and the WEAI annual conferences, and has appeared in The Energy Journal, Energy Policy, Energy Economics, and other leading peer-reviewed journals. Dr. Dagher has been a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, GWU, Virginia Tech, UCLA, and the National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colorado. Dr. Dagher holds a Bachelor of Engineering from the American University of Beirut and a Ph.D. in Mineral Economics from the Colorado School of Mines.