Publications

This book is a result of several years of research to provide readers with a novel and comprehensive analysis on business models in banking, essential to understanding bank businesses pre- and post- financial crisis and how they evolve in the financial system. This book will provide depositors, creditors, credit rating agencies, investors, regulators, supervisors, and other market participants with a comprehensive analytical framework and analysis to better understand the nature of risk attached to the bank business models and its contribution to systemic risk throughout the economic cycle. The book will also guide post-graduate students and researchers delving into this topic.

Recent years have witnessed a global commitment to advancing financial inclusion as a key enabler for promoting equal opportunity and reducing poverty. In this paper, we use the IMF’s Financial Access Survey data and two different approaches to construct a multidimensional financial inclusion index for a global sample of 95 countries over 2004-15. Results reveal an overall progress in financial inclusion over the period under study, most markedly in the use and access dimensions. Financial inclusion appears to be positively and significantly associated with GDP per capita, employment, bank competition, human development, government integrity, and internet usage. Our evidence also points to the importance of considering the level of national income when designing policies to boost financial inclusion.

This paper proposes a comprehensive assessment of the effect of different trade barriers (tariffs, non-tariff measures and services restrictions) on wages in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. These disparities are studied in four dimensions: wage premiums, gender (males versus females), qualification (skilled versus unskilled), and regional (urban versus rural workers). We use three datasets, which are the Egyptian Labour Market Panel Survey (2012), the Jordanian Labour Market Panel Survey (2010) and the Tunisian Labour Market Panel Survey (2014). Following Goldberg and Pavnick (2004) and Zaki (2013), we directly assess the effect of trade policy on wage disparity using the human capital model (Mincer, 1974) to which different trade barriers are added. Our results suggest that, in general, the effect of services restrictions and non-tariff measures are much stronger than that of tariffs on wage premium. When we look at different segments, we find that females are more affected by non-tariff measures than their male counterparts. At the skill level, and given the abundance of blue collar workers in the MENA region, production workers are less affected by both non-tariff measures and by services restrictions than non-production workers, but are more affected by tariffs. Finally, all trade barriers do not have a differential effect on urban vs. rural workers.