Tag: Business Law
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 ...
When it comes to human rights, the US is guilty of blatant hypocrisy
The US has punished Chinese companies for Uighur oppression, but ignores an Israeli surveillance state that routinely intimidates Palestinians The United States has traditionally positioned itself as a champion of human rights around the world, speaking out for dissidents and minorities in Syria, China, Russia and Iran. The US government has frequently employed restrictions or ...
Arms sales are about profit and politics, not ethics
We must expose where public dollars are really being spent and boycott or divest from the enterprises that profit from selling munitions that kill. Western governments were quick to express their outrage at Turkey’s invasion of northern Syria to clear it of Kurds, resulting in the displacement of more than 275,000. Ten countries—including the United States, ...
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); ...
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 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 ...
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 ...
Shareholder Protection and Corporate Value
Empirical analyses, such as that of Brockman and Chung (2003), Caprio et al., (2007), Claessens and Fan (2002), Johnson et al. (2000a) and La Porta et al. (2002) suggest that the legal protection of shareholders’ rights influences the valuation of firms. This is important for this thesis as the size of financial markets which is ...
The Financial Markets Development and Economic Growth
The literature argues that financial markets are the fundamental channel through which most governments attempt to regulate their economies’ performance including combating inflation, promoting economic growth in the output of goods and services, and providing employment (Merton, 1990). It has been noted that the most successful economies have well developed financial markets (Levine and Zervos, ...