Working papers

Drawing on different traditions of institutional analysis, the present study aims at eliciting the perception of institutional uncertainty amongst private sector decision makers and to assess its effect on job creation perspectives. This is done by developing an original subjective indicator to measure the uncertainty induced by institutions and by analysing the results of a survey administered amongst a representative sample of 319 entrepreneurs, business owners, and top managers in Jordan. The estimation of binary logit models signals that our measure of institutional uncertainty is a good predictor for the perspectives of job creation and firm growth and that, in particular, uncertainty related to the judiciary, political instability, and wasta has a significant effect on discouraging job creation expectations

This paper aims at analysing the effects of FDI that mostly originate from the EU country partners, on economic growth in Morocco. Using yearly time series data from 1973 to 2014, the Vector Autoregressive Regression (VAR) modelling has been used to study the different relations that link FDI, GDP and international trade (imports and exports). Furthermore, Granger causality model has also been implemented to capture causality relationships between the macroeconomic variables. Given that agriculture is a key sector within the structure of the Moroccan economy, both models are performed likewise. Results show that there is a unidirectional relationship between FDI and economic growth in Morocco; meaning that GDP causes FDI, while FDI does not cause GDP growth. Similarly, the agricultural GDP seems to be significantly co-integrated only with its own lagged values, stressing that no role of agricultural FDI is econometrically noted. Surely, these results have to be linked to the relative weakness of inflowing FDI during the considered period, as it theoretically would be expected. However, policy makers would have to review the whole policy that aims at encouraging FDI as an economic growth promoter in Morocco, including the diversification of FDI origin.

This paper focuses on estimating wage differentials between males and females in Egypt to understand the determinants of the gender wage gap. The methodology depends on Oaxaca-Blinder and Neuman-Oaxaca decomposition techniques, using the data of the Egypt Labour Market Panel Survey 2006 and 2012 (ELMPS 2006, 2012). The findings of this paper determine the differences in wages due to real variations in characteristics between both genders, for example, education, experience, living in urban or rural areas, the marital status and the sector of employment and other differences, due to discrimination against women in addition to unobservable differences. It is estimated that the wage gap between males and females was 25% and 21% in 2006 and 2012, respectively, and that is a sign of improvement. Part of this gap can be explained by the fact that females are less likely to have high-level and high-paying jobs than males. Moreover, unobservables like non-cognitive skills or psychological characteristics are considered innovative explanations for the gender wage gap.