Escalating obesity rates have become a significant public health problem in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and have been associated with shifts towards a westernized diet. This integrative review aimed to examine the current dietary trends and transitions and their association with obesity in Arabic-speaking countries of the MENA region. Relevant databases were searched for stud...

IICR and ICRG country risk scores are examined in a decision tree framework to analyze groupings on countries, including Middle East and North Africa. INTRODUCTION The purpose of this paper is to examine if Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries form a distinct financial risk group, based on financial predictor variables and country risk scores. Country risk scores are calculated interna...

Human Capital Formation, Life Expectancy and the Process of Economic Development This paper presents a microfounded theory of long-term development. We model the interplay between economic variables, namely the process of human capital formation and technological progress, and the biological constraint of finite lifetime expectancy. All these processes affect each other and are endogenously det...

The paper examines an R&D model with uncertainty from the population growth, which is a stochastic cooperative Lotka-Volterra system, and obtains a sufficiently condition for the existence of the globally positive solution. The long-run growth rate of the economic system is ultimately bounded in mean and fluctuation of its growth will not be faster than the polynomial growth. When uncertainty o...

The objective of this work is to try to define and calculate the optimal growth path, in the presence of exogenous technical change, without resorting to the discounted-sum criterion. The solution suggested is to consider an optimality criterion expressing an Allais-anonymous intergenerational consensus. The partial characterization of consensual optimality was made possible thanks to the decom...

It has been widely recognized that China has had a large pool of surplus labour. However, despite its significant implications for wage levels and the Chinese economy, the current debates yield conflicting results as to whether the Lewis turning point has been reached. This paper clarifies a theoretical issue about the mechanisms of surplus labour absorption, subsequently indentifies two Lewis ...

We study the mechanisms according to which social infrastructure influences the preservation of physical capital and, consequently, economic growth. The presented model considers that social infrastructure is a specific type of human capital, which acts in order to preserve already existing physical capital, by, e.g. reducing the incentive for rent seeking or corruption. Using an innovative met...

We analyse two potential effects arising from regional (and with EU) integration—increased quality of institutions (including the quality of financial institutions) and, economic policies and reduced multilateral exchange rate volatility—in a conditional convergence growth framework for MENA countries. To this purpose we outline an ad hoc methodology which implements the traditional bilateral e...

We consider economic growth in the presence of a minimal survival consumption level when preferences are lexicographic giving highest priority to the survival of the current and then all future generations. Knowledge of production is incomplete so future output made possible by current saving must be estimated. The resulting capital accumulation path is compared with the inter–temporally optima...

The paper examines the interactions between economic integration and population agglomeration in a middle product economy displaying neoclassical growth. There are two vertically integrated economies. Each consists of a large number of final good competitive firms operating plants in both regions, and a large number of intermediate goods monopolistically competitive firms operating each in only...