Working papers

The paper examines the impact of Technical Barriers to Trade (TBTs) on firm exports in Egypt, over the period (2005-2011). It uses firm-level data for Egypt and combines it with the TBT specific trade concerns database of the WTO. Employing a variant of a gravity model with high-dimensional fixed effects, it estimates the impact of TBTs on firm intensive and extensive margins, exit and entry probabilities, as well as on product and market diversification. Regressions examine the heterogeneous effect of TBTs by firm size. Results indicate an insignificant effect of TBTs on firm intensive margin.  On the other hand, the extensive margin and entry probability are negatively affected by TBTs, while exit probability is positively affected. Accordingly, TBTs mainly represent an increase in fixed costs of exporting. Importantly, smaller firms are more adversely affected by TBTs in their export participation and entry and exit decisions. The effect of TBTs on firm product diversification is found to be sector-dependent; positive for agricultural sectors and mixed for non-agricultural ones. Finally, firms generally tend to increase their market diversification in response to TBTs. This is especially true for large firms within their set of African and Asian destination markets. By contrast, there are less prospects of firm diversification into less stringent destinations within the European region.

Since the seminal paper of Sachs and Warner (1995), several justifications have been advanced to explain the observed disparities in the performance between the oil resource dependent economies. The most important one deals with the quality of the institutions although no agreement has been made on the importance of their role, or the direction in which they affect economic growth. Some recent studies point to the interaction effect on growth of both “natural resources” and “institutions” factors. In this paper, we focus on these interaction effects to explain why countries rich in oil resources can be both winners and losers due to ions of their institutions. We use a specific econometric approach to e simultaneously analyse the interaction effects and the threshold from which the so-called ‘natural resource curse’ can be reversed. We examine the effect of the interaction between natural resources and the quality of institutions on corruption and economic growth, and the interaction between natural resources and the revenue level on corruption and economic growth. The estimation of our models is based on a sample of 24 countries for the period 2000-2015.

Education is an investment and its returns, in terms of increased wages, can be used as an indicator of productivity in an economy. Also, skills utilisation is important for productivity and whenever there is a misalignment between the skills demanded and those available, it is spoken of as skills mismatch. This paper provides an overview on skills mismatch and estimates gender differences in the returns to education in Jordan. The econometric analysis is hereby based on the estimation of fixed effects’ models on a set of pseudo panel data, covering the period between 2000 and 2015. The findings reveal that returns to education for male employees are higher than for female employees (the wage premium from one additional year of schooling is 6.8% for males and 5.4% for females) and that, on average, females are paid 74% of what males earn. We explain this result based on some peculiarities of female participation in Jordan’s labour market. Concerning skills mismatch, the analysis points to the existence of over-education and under-skilling.