Arab World « GDNet Blog

Measuring the immeasurable: Understanding corruption

March 26, 2012 by Zeinab Sabet Leave a comment

By Shahira Emara & Maya Madkour

Corruption is wrong, dishonest and damaging. Causes,effects,and determinantsof corruption, methods of measuring its implications, and the means to understand and fight it, are increasingly becoming a priority on national and international agendas.

Paul Collier, Oxford University, argues that the absence of proper governance and democracy in the Middle East, among many other regions, provide fertile grounds to cultivate bad practices and processes that foster corruption. With the Arab Awakening, people all over the world are now more aware of the ever-growing cost of corruption and its astronomic ripple effect. Measuring the cost of corruption is a challenge because it is perceived in many different ways.

Corruption comes in many different colors, shapes and sizes; and being able to spot it in its different garbs is helpful. A causal, long-term relationship usually exists between corruption and social development goals, like tackling

infant mortality and illiteracy.Corporate bribery, political, and legal corruption often take place regardless of where the country sits on the development hierarchy. But the costs of corruption are relative to where different countries sit within this hierarchy.

GDNet Participates in the Food Secure Arab World Conference

February 29, 2012 by Zeinab Sabet Leave a comment

By Maya Madkour, GDNet

Development practitioners, researchers and policy-makers from the world over convened early February in Beirut, Lebanon to come up with a roadmap for creating a healthy, secure Arab World, free from hunger. Working together to translate research into policy, participants came from a variety of different backgrounds; and of course, GDNet was there.

The Food Secure Arab World Conference, organized by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UN-ESCWA), called for better policy implementation, regional knowledge platforms pooling local knowledge, and collaborating with local and international partners on food, nutrition, and water security issues.

“Understanding and Avoiding the Oil Curse in the Arab World” was the theme for the ERF & AFESD Conference

January 23, 2012 by Zeinab Sabet Leave a comment

Organized jointly by the Economic Research Forum and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, the conference “Understanding and Avoiding the Oil Curse in the Arab World” was held in Kuwait on January 15-16, 2012 and convened around 100 regional and international researchers.

Eleven countries of the twenty-two members of the League of the Arab States are oil exporters and they account for approximately 55 percent of global oil reserves and 29 percent of natural gas reserves. The hydrocarbon sector dominates these economies, contributing about 50 percent to GDP and 80 percent to government revenues. Neighboring countries are also impacted by oil, through its impact on labor earnings, capital mobility and trade in goods and services between oil and non-oil exporters. If the region does not harness the power of natural resources, it is likely to experience extreme volatility, post-boom growth collapses, Dutch disease, weakened institutions and rent-seeking behaviors: the so called “oil curse.” The reverse also holds.

In this context ERF has initiated a major research undertaking on “understanding and avoiding the oil curse in the Arab world,” which aims at understanding the macroeconomic challenges related to oil dependency as well as exploring options to address those challenges including fiscal, financial, monetary and exchange rate policies.

Bringing together renowned academics and policy makers, the primary objective of this conference was to initiate discussions on the macroeconomic challenges posed by oil dependency in Arab countries, and of policies for harnessing the power of natural resources. The conference was preceded by a workshop, which was held in Cairo on October 7- 8 2011 to discuss draft papers.

To view posts from the Conference, check the ERF blog

Download the conference agenda

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Filed under Conferences and Events Tagged with AFESD, Arab World, economic development, ERF, oil, Oil Curse, Oil Dependency, social development