Omar S. Dahi

Trade Flows, Exchange Rate Uncertainty, and Financial Depth: Evidence from 28 Emerging Countries

This paper investigates the effects of real exchange rate uncertainty on manufactures exports from 28 emerging economies, representing 82\% of all developing country manufactures exports, and explores the sources of heterogeneity in the uncertainty effects by controlling for the direction of trade (South-North or South-South), and the level of financial development of the exporting country. The empirical results show that for more than half of the countries the uncertainty effect is unidirectional, either South-South or South-North, and the median impact is negative. In addition, while we find that financial development augments trade, exchange rate shocks can negate this effect. Last but not the least, trade among developing economies improves export growth under exchange rate shocks.

Revolts in Syria: Tracking the Convergence Between Authoritarianism and Neoliberalism:

With the popular revolt in Syria entering its ninth month, it is becoming more evident that the current regime is reaching its historical limits. To understand the origin of these revolts, however, one needs to explore the longer-term history. This report situates Syria’s uprisings within the wider Arab trajectory and argues that the state socialist model built by the Syrian Ba’ath in the 1960s has given way to an organic relationship between Westernized merchant classes and authoritarian forces. However, the increasing fusion between neoliberal and authoritarian forces also created the possibilities for the social revolts.

South-South Trade in Manufactures: Current Performance and Obstacles for Growth

The last two decades have witnessed resurgence in South-South trade, investment, and regional integration. This article examines trade performance in total and technology-and-skill-intensive manufactures for a sample of twenty-eight developing countries with both developed (South-North) and other developing (South-South) countries. Previous studies and our sample data show that South-South trade in manufactures is characterized by higher capital and skill-intensive factor content relative to South-North trade, with major implications for development in the South, including the possibility of dynamic gains through learning by exporting, technological externalities, allocative efficiencies, and scale economies. The article concludes by discussing obstacles to increasing South-South trade and possibilities for future research on the topic.

Preferential trade agreements and manufactured goods exports: does it matter whom you PTA with?

This article explores two questions. First, do preferential trade agreements (PTAs) affect manufactured goods exports of developing countries? Second, does it matter for developing countries whom they sign the PTAs with? We find that the answer to both questions is yes. Using bilateral manufactured goods exports data from 28 developing countries during 1978–2005; we find that South–South PTAs have a significantly positive effect on manufactured goods exports. In contrast, no such effect is detected in the case of South–North PTAs. We confirmed the robustness of these findings to estimation methodology, sample selection, time period, zero trade flows and multilateral trade resistance.

The Middle East and North Africa

The growth and development performance of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region presents one of the major anomalies that current economics literature seeks to resolve, which is how to reconcile the existence of massive natural resources with the high unemployment, low growth and the general underdevelopment of the region. In this debate, much attention is focused on the problems arising from: a) state oriented inward looking economic policies, b) lack of ‘integration’ with the world economy, c) underdeveloped financial sectors and chilling investment climate, and d) low levels of human capital development. In this paper, we attempt to present a summarized yet more balanced and hopefully more insightful analysis of the growth and development experience of the countries in the region with a special attention given to the existing bottlenecks hindering future development prospects. While discussing the MENA region as a whole we will divide the countries into five subgroups: 1) oil rich labor importing states (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Libya, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia) 2) oil rich labor abundant states (Algeria, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Iraq, Syria), 3) oil poor labor abundant NICs (Egypt, Morocco, Turkey), 4) oilpoor limited natural resource states (Israel, Tunisia, West Bank and Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon), and 5) natural resource poor states (Sudan, Yemen). (Richards and Waterbury, 1996). Although the inclusion of Turkey, Israel, and Iran is controversial as the trajectory of the Arab and other Middle Eastern countries constitute a more appropriate whole, they share many commonalities as well. However, unless stated otherwise, the general statements will exclude Turkey and Israel. The economic history of MENA region is characterized by several cycles of growth and accumulation. In retrospect, the region formerly enjoyed higher levels of economic development and prosperity compared to its counterparts in Europe. While Istanbul with its 700,000 inhabitants in 16 century was the largest city in the world, North Africa overall was much more urbanized than Europe (Paris with 125,000 inhabitants vs. Cairo with 450,000 around 1500) (Bairoch, 1997:517-537). However, in the last of these cycles, the region experienced a decline in its growth and development indicators starting from early 18 century with the factors that precipitated this decline remaining a source of continuing debate. The current essay will focus

SOUTH–SOUTH AND NORTH–SOUTH ECONOMIC EXCHANGES: DOES IT MATTER WHO IS EXCHANGING WHAT AND WITH WHOM?

This paper surveys the literature on costs and benefits of South–South versus North–South economic exchanges. Unlike the case for North–South exchanges, academic work on South–South economic relations has been historically limited given their marginal importance in the global economy. After the 1990s, the literature has changed in two main ways. First, South–South trade and finance since then has increased dramatically, leading to a bourgeoning literature on the topic. Second, the rise of the Emerging South has opened up new lines of inquiry to include not just the traditional topics of trade and preferential trading agreements, but also cover technology transfer, capital flows, labor migration, institutions, and environment. We discuss how this literature has evolved to take into account the greater complexity of South–South relations with a focus on China in Africa as well as the blurring of the lines between heterodox and mainstream analysis of South–South relations. We end the review by showing how the empirical and theoretical literature is exploring the increasing divergence within the global South between what we refer to as the Emerging South and the Rest of South.

Towards a Beirut School of critical security studies

ABSTRACT This collectively written work offers a map of our ongoing efforts to work through critical approaches to the study of security and global politics with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa, engaging both experiences and voices of scholars from and working in the region. The unique contribution of the project, we suggest, is threefold. First, we reflect on our commitment to decolonial pedagogy, and how our collective experiences organising a Beirut-based summer school on critical security studies for graduate students and junior scholars living and working in West Asia, North Africa, and the Levant are shaping the project. Second, we affirm and extend the contributions that postcolonial international relations and critical approaches to security have made to scholarship on the region, and to our own work. Third, we take inspiration from the C.A.S.E. collective’s interest in ‘security traps’ and address how and to what extent security discourse may risk colonising other fields in the pursuit of interdisciplinary scholarship. The article concludes with a transition to individual reflections by the authors to highlight the plurality of approaches to the project.