Speakers
Dr Ibrahim El Badawi
Managing Director, Economic Research Forum
Biography:
Ibrahim Elbadawi is the Managing Director of ERF. Earlier he served as the director of research at the Dubai Economic Council, which he joined in March 2009. Before that, he was lead economist at the Development Research Group of the World Bank, which he joined in 1989. He has published widely on macroeconomic and development policy, democratic transitions and the economics of civil wars and post-conflict transitions. He was the thematic leader of the Natural Resource Management and Economic Diversification theme at the ERF for fi e years and is a member of the Advisory Board of the Arab Planning Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in economics and statistics from NC State and Northwestern Universities. He is the co-editor (with Hoda Selim) of Understanding and Avoiding the Oil Curse in Resource-Rich Arab Economies. Cambridge University Press: 2016
"Exchange Rate Undervaluation, Economic Institutions and Exports Performance: Evidence from Arab Firm-Level Data"
Exploiting a new dataset available for four countries (Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and Yemen), this paper assesses the claim that real exchange rate undervaluation affects both the quantity of exports (intensive margin) and the probability of exporting a certain product to a certain destination (extensive margin) of trade in Arab countries. We find robust evidence suggesting that RER undervaluation promotes exports at both the intensive margin and extensive margins in a non-linear fashion. Moreover, the impact of undervaluation seems to be conditional on the size of the firm. Indeed, at the intensive margin level, small and medium firms are more affected than large ones. By contrast, undervaluation has a higher effect on large firms at the extensive margin measured by the number of destinations. When we control also for economic institutions, we found that whereas financial underdevelopment affects the extensive margin for both medium and large firms, lengthier time to trade exerts a negative impact for all firms. Hence, undervaluation may counter-balance institutional deficiency in Arab countries.