Category: Law and Finance
Why is the Middle East Drawing Business Investments Despite Turmoil?
An OHCHR press conference on business and human rights, Geneva 2012.Source: US Mission Photo by Eric Bridiers, Flickr For the third consecutive year, economic growth in the Middle East and North Africa in 2019 fell to 0.1 percent, due to a combination of geopolitical turmoil, policy constraints and US sanctions on several states in the region. This unsatisfactory and dismal economic performance ...
Middle East Banks Neglect Human Rights Implications of their Business Practices
French bank BNP Paribas faces as ongoing lawsuit for its alleged role in financing Omar al-Bashir’s regime in Sudan. Source: BNP Paribas Money makes the world go ‘round, as the saying goes. It greases the wheels of global business as well as eases the pain in the gap between the haves and the have nots ...
MENA Businesses & Human Rights: How should we move forward?
Nine years after the so-called “Arab Spring” protests swept the Middle East and North Africa, with mostly young people calling for the end of autocracy and respect for their human rights, civil and human rights are more at risk than ever. Governments across the region engage in vicious, factional wars for control (Syria, Yemen, Libya); ...
Equity market reaction to events surrounding reforms in the minority shareholder protection
My 2012 thesis investigated the equity market reaction to events surrounding reforms in the quality and levels of minority shareholder protection, in particular country jurisdictions. The analysis was carried out using one minority shareholder legal protection reform that was enacted in Saudi Arabia and two reforms enacted in Tunisia from late 2007 until early 2009. ...
Empirical results of the relation between the minority shareholders protection and equity markets
My thesis examined empirically whether higher levels of legal protection for minority shareholders are associated with equity markets which were larger, more active, and faster in issuing new securities, that is to say equity market development. Using a sample of 16 MENA countries over the period between 2005-2009, panel data analyses as well as the ...
MENA’s Banking sector and monetary policy
The MENA region is classified as a bank-based financial system, where banks control most financial flows and possess most financial assets (Sourial , 2004: Ben Naceur and Omran, 2010). Although, there are over 600 banks with a widespread network of thousands of branches in the MENA countries, the World Bank (2009) suggests that there are fewer ...
MENA’s Economic Background
Despite the MENA region being rich in oil, gas and other natural resources, it still falls far behind other developing regions, especially Latin America and South East Asia, in terms of economic development (Wilson and Munawar, 1995). During the past 25 years, the MENA has shown an overall weakness in economic performance, being less economically ...
Demographic Characteristics of MENA Region
Historically, the MENA countries have been considered to include some of the world’s fastest growing populations (Fahimi and Kent, 2007). However, in the last three decades the region has experienced declines in its demographic growth rate. This is mainly due to the fall in fertility rates that started in North Africa and later spread to ...
Defining the MENA region
There is no standard definition of the MENA region, however, as the name indicates, the term compromises two main areas. The first part of the term, Middle East, creates a problem of definition as the geographical area does not have precisely defined borders. The Middle East was first used as term by the British in ...
Investor Protection and Dividend Policy
LLSV (2000b) show that countries with strong shareholder rights are able to force firms to disgorge cash and pay higher dividends. They find that dividend policies vary across legal regimes in ways consistent with a particular version of the agency theory of dividends. Specifically, firms in common law countries, where investor protection is typically better, ...