Category: Overview of the MENA Region
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 ...
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); ...
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 ...