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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the level of voluntary compliance with, and disclosure of, corporate governance (CG) best practices, and the extent to which board characteristics and shareholding structures can explain discernible differences in the level of voluntary CG disclosure in a number of emerging Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) economies.

The paper uses a number of multivariate regression methods, namely, ordinary least squares, weighted, non-linear, lagged-effects, two-stage least squares and fixed-effects regression techniques to analyse data collected for a sample of listed corporations in emerging MENA economies from 2009 to 2014.

First, in general, MENA listed firms have a relatively lower level of voluntary compliance with, and disclosure of, CG practices compared to listed firms in developed countries. Second, the evidence suggests that corporate board characteristics, including board diversity, have a positive association with the level of voluntary CG disclosure. In contrast, the findings indicate that unitary board leadership structure, director shareholdings and government shareholdings negatively impact on the level of voluntary CG disclosure. The study does not, however, find any evidence to suggest that family shareholdings have any significant relationship with the level of voluntary CG disclosure. The findings are generally robust to alternative measures and potential endogeneity problems.

This is one of the first empirical efforts at investigating the association between CG mechanisms and voluntary disclosure in emerging MENA economies that observably relies on a multi-theoretical framework within a longitudinal cross-country research setting.

This paper aims to examine and compare the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows on bank deposits in aggregate as well as at the level of conventional and Islamic banks in Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries. The study also tests hypotheses of direct and indirect impacts of FDI flow and FDI stock on bank deposits.

Static and dynamic panel generalized methods of moments (GMM) estimation techniques are applied to analyze a large data set of 491 commercial banks (422 conventional banks and 69 Islamic banks) across 18 MENA countries between 1993 and 2017 (12,275 year observations).

Empirical results indicate that inflowing FDI flow and FDI stock have a significant negative direct impact on deposits of MENA banks. The results lend support for the direct channel hypothesis for the effect of FDI on bank deposits and find no evidence in support of the indirect channel hypothesis. FDI inflows affect bank deposits directly via increased FDI-related excessive competition in the banking market. Deposits from conventional banks appear to be more affected than those from Islamic banks. The variation may due to the fact that Islamic banks have fewer multinational corporations (MNC) customers than conventional banks and therefore are less sensitive to fluctuations in FDI.

From this analysis, this study concludes that foreign investments have a higher productivity than local investments in MENA region. Attracting more FDI is aimed at increasing overall national productivity through competition. However, governments would be wise to enact such a policy to maximize benefits and minimize potential harm to local industry. Furthermore, FDI policy should encourage small to medium-size banks and firms (SMEs)’ participation and linkage with multinational banks and MNCs, while upgrading research and development institutions and innovation activities to help SMEs to benefit from potential spillovers from foreign presence in the industry. In addition, the linkage and connection between SMEs and foreign firms should be strengthened and promoted by government policy.

This study is the first of its kind to examine the effect of FDI inflows on bank deposits. It also provides an in-depth quantitative analysis of the impact of FDI flow and FDI stock, separately, on bank deposits for both conventional and Islamic banks. It distinguishes between direct and indirect channels through which FDI inflows may affect bank deposits. The study analyzes 25 years of panel data for 491 banks (12,275 year observations) and uses both static and dynamic panel GMM estimation techniques to analyze the data.

The study aims to empirically examine the effect of bank liquidity creation on non-performing loans (NPLs) in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

Berger and Bouwman's (2009) three-step methodology was employed to calculate the level of liquidity creation of a selected sample of 111 commercial banks in ten MENA countries from 2010–2017. Next, the two-step system generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator was used to investigate the linkage between bank liquidity creation and NPLs.

The results demonstrated a significant negative effect of bank liquidity creation on NPLs in the short and long term, implying that liquidity creation through both on- and off-balance sheet activities decreases NPLs. These findings accord with the “economic-enhancing” view. Furthermore, regression analysis investigated whether this relationship remained similar for Islamic and conventional banks. The results showed that liquidity creation diminishes Islamic and conventional bank NPLs.

The empirical findings raise several significant policy implications. Bank liquidity creation may decrease rather than increase NPLs, although the process of liquidity creation is viewed as risky by rendering banks more illiquid. Therefore, policy-makers should encourage bank liquidity creation to stimulate the economy. In a robust economy, borrowers are more likely to repay their debts, consequently diminishing banks' NPLs.

To the best of the author's knowledge, the current study is the first to provide empirical evidence on the effect of bank liquidity creation on NPLs in MENA countries.

Despite the possession of considerable natural, financial and human resources, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region suffers low economic growth rates, high unemployment rates, high poverty rates and high illiteracy rates. The purpose of this paper is to find out the factors that hinder the development of economic activities in this region.

This study uses co-integration analysis and vector error correction model on a sample of 18 MENA countries, covering the period 2002–2016. It exploits gross domestic product (GDP) as a dependent variable, and public debt, trade balance, natural resources rents, importation of high technology, labour participation rate, military spending, population size, political instability and corruption as independent variables.

The paper finds that public borrowing, trade deficit, military expenditures, the low level of technological innovation, population, political turbulences and corruption, all hinder GDP in the long-run. Additionally, public debt, military spending and political instability obstruct GDP in the short run. The results also suggest the existence of Dutch diseases in both the short- and the long-run. On the other hand, labour market conditions do not seem to have any effect on the economic performance of the MENA countries.

In addition of examining an understudied sample of countries, this paper – unlike other studies on the MENA region that look at factors that boost economic growth – exploits factors that have possible negative impact on the economic situation of the region.

This paper investigates the main drivers of foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows for a balanced panel of 11 Middle East and North Africa (MENA) economies over the 1995–2017 annual period. The author postulates that the impacts of the main pull (growth) and push (global financial conditions, GFC) factors may not be invariant to endogenously estimated thresholds for structural domestic conditions (SDCs) including trade and capital account openness, financial development, human capital (HC) and natural resource endowments.

The author investigates whether the main SDC provide endogenous thresholds for the impacts of basic pull and push factors on FDI inflows for the MENA sample by employing panel fixed effects threshold procedure of Hansen (1999). As a robustness check, the author also present the results of the dynamic panel data two-step system generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation, which explicitly consider the potential endogeneity of SDC along with main pull factor for the evolution of FDI inflows.

Growth, GFC and SDC are important drivers of FDI inflows. The impacts of SDC tend to be higher in countries with higher financial depth, openness to international trade and finance and lower natural resource and HC endowments. The sensitivities of FDI inflows to GFC are substantially higher in the countries which are more open to international trade and capital flows and higher levels of financial depth. FDI inflows are found to be pro-cyclical and this pro-cyclicality tends to be much higher for the episodes exceeding the SDC thresholds.

Improving SDC including higher openness to international trade and finance and financial development may be effective in encouraging FDI inflows. The findings support an argument that, better SDC are crucially important not only for attracting FDI but also achieving the growth benefits of FDI inflows. Therefore, improving SDC appears to be an important growth-oriented policy agenda for emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) including MENA.

The impacts of the main push and pull factors on FDI (and capital) inflows may be nonlinear. The literature often tackles the nonlinearity issue either by some interaction specifications or imposing exogenous thresholds. The literature, however, is yet to comprehensively investigate whether the main SDC provide endogenous thresholds for the impacts of basic pull and push factors. The author aims to contribute to the literature by estimating endogenous SDC threshold levels for the impacts of the main determinants of FDI flows for MENA.

The purpose of this article is to examine is to the link between stock markets and economic growth in advanced and emerging economies in the Middle East and North Africa (mena) region.

Indices measuring the degree of financial openness and market development are constructed and used to perform various Granger causality tests to identify predictors of current growth rates.

It is found that the link exists only in the group of high income countries but this relationship is rather weak for the low income MENA economies. Privatization alone, although necessary, is not enough to spur economic growth. The establishment of sound institutions and well‐defined regulatory policies are needed to protect investors’ rights and entice them to invest in real and financial assets in the MENA region.

The paper offers insights into financial integration, regulation and competitiveness in MENA countries.

This paper aims to offer a wider examination of the research concerning entrepreneurship characteristics in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region via a review of recent studies relevant to this topic. Research publications concerning entrepreneurship within the MENA region evidence growing interest in this field of study, with the potential to boost and drive future economic development and growth. This focus within entrepreneurship research is because of the economic development in the region, which is becoming increasingly important for policymakers and businesses.

The author performed a systematic literature review to produce robust information about entrepreneurship in the MENA region, followed by a thematic analysis to identify key research themes within each category.

Despite the growth in entrepreneurship research in the MENA region, research on certain factors is lacking. An analysis of 271 studies published between 2009 and 2019 identifies 9 main research categories, within which 30 themes have attracted significant academic attention. Female entrepreneurship and gender, youth entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship behaviour and orientation are the three key categories influencing perspectives on entrepreneurship in the MENA region. This study highlights research gaps and provides recommendations to guide future research on the sustainable development of entrepreneurship in the MENA region.

This paper highlights trends in entrepreneurship research amongst scholars within the MENA region and suggests paths for future research efforts.

This paper aims to investigate bank-specific determinants affecting the dividend policy of commercial banks listed in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region countries.

The study uses pooled and panel tobit and logit regression analyses based on 16-year unbalanced data with 1,593 firm-year observations collecting from 117 commercial banks listed in 11 MENA countries.

The results indicated that the main bank-specific factors affecting dividend payment decisions are bank size, profitability, capital adequacy, credit risk and bank age in the context of the MENA emerging markets. In addition, the analysis showed that the yearly dummy for the global financial crisis (2008–2009) has a significant negative effect, while the yearly dummy for the Arabic spring crisis (2010–2011) has no significant effect on the dividend payment decision of banks listed in the MENA region. Furthermore, the growth opportunity is not one of the key factors affecting dividend policies by banks in MENA emerging markets. Considering this information, it is reasonable to conclude that MENA region banks’ dividend decisions follow investment decisions. In other words, the dividend decisions and investment decisions are independent of each other. The findings support theories (hypotheses) of dividends such as residual, signalling, regulatory pressures, transaction cost and lifecycle.

This study is restricted to a sample of one type of financial firm, conventional commercial banks listed in the MENA markets because of the problem of missing data and limited information on other financial firms for the same period, particularly Islamic banks. Moreover, the focus of this study was on factors that are considered bank fundamentals. However, ownership variables were not included in the study because of unavailability.

The results of this study have several important implications for banks’ dividend policymakers, regulators, analysts and investors. Dividend policymakers in MENA emerging markets seem to use residual dividend policy, in which they distribute dividends according to what is left over after all acceptable investment opportunities have been undertaken. These inconsistent, unstable dividend policy trends make it difficult for investors to predict future dividend decisions. Further, this practise may convey information to shareholders about a lack of positive future investment opportunities. This may negatively affect the share value of banks. Acquiring a broad understanding of the dividend behaviour of MENA banks enables regulators to take more effective regulatory actions to protect shareholders and depositors. Finally, the results of this study can help analysts and investors build their dividends predictions and investment strategies.

The banking sector plays a disproportionately large role in the development of emerging economies. Therefore, this study is one of the first to examine a large cross-country sample of MENA banks (117) for an extensive period (2000–2015). The study includes both the Global financial crisis and Arab uprising periods, including after the liberalization and recent economic reforms and structural changes in financial sectors across MENA countries.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effects of corruption on investment and growth in 15 Middle East and North African (MENA) countries during the period 1985-2013. The authors used the International Country Risk Guide (ICRG) corruption index and conducted a panel cointegration analysis and Granger causality procedure to detect the dynamic relationships between the variables. Results indicate that corruption is a serious hurdle to economic growth in MENA countries since it affects investment activities and foreign direct investment inflows. In this case, policymakers have to implement effective anti-corruption strategies to avoid the epidemic of corruption.

The authors used the ICRG corruption index and conducted a panel cointegration analysis and Granger causality procedure to detect the dynamic relationships between the variables.

The main findings of this paper show that corruption is a serious hurdle to economic growth in MENA countries since it affects investment activities and foreign direct investment inflows. In this case, policymakers have to implement effective anti-corruption strategies to avoid the epidemic of corruption.

Unfortunately, in this study the authors did not use institutional variables to see their role and to judge whether governments should enhance the quality of institution and improve the corporate governance. This would be an opportunity to expand the sample and to conduct a new research in the near future to assess the real costs of corruption in the MENA region.

Governments and policymakers need to apprehend and admit that corruption is an important issue that deters foreign direct investment and threats the economic development and growth. Corruption can also deteriorate the infrastructure and increase the cost of doing business for both government and private sector which in turn will lower the growth (Tanzi and Doovi, 1997). It is worth recalling that during the past five years, a large part of the MENA region has witnessed multiple social upheavals. Hence, corruption must be tackled effectively and coherently to avoid further social tensions. It is the proper time to take serious steps and strict policy actions within a zero-tolerance framework to fight corruption and its widespread. New rules, laws, and anti-corruption procedures are among the most important initiatives that governments should implement. The governments should also increase the public awareness of the multiple drawbacks of corruption by publishing official reports and data on the most corrupted sector in the country. In this case, media will have a key role to diffuse the necessary information.

While most of the previous studies have employed GMM and OLS techniques, the authors opt a panel vector error correction model and cointegration technique to detect causality between the variables used in the model for the present study.

This paper aims to investigate the potential impact of the Basel III liquidity requirements, namely, the net stable funding ratio (NSFR) and the liquidity coverage ratio (LCR), on bank liquidity creation.

The authors developed a dynamic panel model using the Quasi-Maximum Likelihood estimation on an unbalanced panel dataset of 129 commercial banks operating in 10 Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries from 2009 to 2017.

The results show that the NSFR significantly negatively affects liquidity creation. Similarly, the LCR exerts a substantial negative impact on the liquidity creation of the sampled MENA banks. These findings suggest that complying with both liquidity requirements tends to curtail liquidity creation. Moreover, further regression analysis of large and small bank sub-samples uncovered results similar to the overall MENA sample.

The findings raise interesting policy implications and suggest a trade-off between the benefits of the financial resiliency induced by implementing liquidity requirements and the creation of liquidity essential for promoting economic growth in the region.

Most empirical research focuses on the relationship between bank capital and liquidity creation. To the knowledge, this paper is the first to provide empirical evidence on the effect of both the NSFR and LCR regulatory liquidity standards on bank liquidity creation in the MENA region.