Logo
Munich Personal RePEc Archive

Risk Sharing in the Middle East and North Africa: The Role of Remittances and Factor Incomes

Balli, Faruk and Basher, Syed Abul and Jean Louis, Rosmy (2012): Risk Sharing in the Middle East and North Africa: The Role of Remittances and Factor Incomes. Forthcoming in: Economics of Transition

[thumbnail of MPRA_paper_40739.pdf]
Preview
PDF
MPRA_paper_40739.pdf

Download (315kB) | Preview

Abstract

This paper investigates welfare gains and channels of risk sharing among 14 Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries, including the oil-rich Gulf region and the resource-scarce economies such as Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia. The results show that, for the 1992--2009 period, the overall welfare gains across MENA countries are higher than those documented for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations. In the Gulf region, the amount of factor income smoothing does not differ considerably when output shocks are longer-lasting rather than transitory, whereas the amount smoothed by savings increases remarkably when shocks are longer-lasting. By contrast, both factor income flows and international transfers respond more to permanent shocks than to transitory shocks in the non-oil MENA countries. The results also show that a significant portion of shocks is smoothed via remittance transfers in the economically less developed MENA countries, but not in the oil-rich Gulf and OECD countries. Finally, for the overall MENA region, a large part of the shock remains unsmoothed, suggesting that more market integration is needed to remedy the weak link of incomplete risk-sharing.

Atom RSS 1.0 RSS 2.0

Contact us: mpra@ub.uni-muenchen.de

This repository has been built using EPrints software.

MPRA is a RePEc service hosted by Logo of the University Library LMU Munich.