Chahir Zaki

Université d'Orléans | UO · Laboratoire d'Economie d'Orléans

In recent years, deep trade agreements have spread around the world and gone beyond tariff reductions. We aim to test whether the depth of agreements fosters trade in services. To do so, we use a structural gravity‐type model and build new indicators of the depth of agreements based on the number of articles that are legally enforceable and that ar...

This paper analyses the determinants of trade in natural gas through a political economy lens. In addition to the economic determinants of trading in natural gas, the latter could be affected by political determinants such as sanctions and the institutional gap between trading partners. Moreover, while the literature considers the effect of tariffs...

The paper proposes a chronology for the Egyptian economy by detecting phases of expansions and recessions during the period (2002–2019). It examines the cyclical behavior of variables that are considered potentially useful in measuring or predicting aggregate economic activity. To do so, we combine the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) ap...

The COVID-19 pandemic saw two sets of policy responses: lockdown to limit spread of the virus, which was a huge demand and supply shock, and government support to firms and individuals to offset the effects of this policy-induced shock. This paper explores the allocation and effectiveness of government support to firms in Egypt. We consider both fi...

Les accords commerciaux profonds stimulent les échanges de services. Cet impact est d’autant plus important que les institutions des partenaires commerciaux sont similaires. Ce dernier effet ressort particulièrement pour les pays en développement, comme le montre l’exemple des pays du Moyen-Orient et de l’Afrique du Nord. Codes JEL : F10, F14, L80.

The objective of this paper is to analyze the economic and political determinants of IMF loans in low- and middle-income countries and their impact on economic growth. Our contribution is threefold. First, we use the IMF Monitoring of Fund Agreements database along with international political economy factors to analyze IMF lending determinants thr...

Using dyadic trade data and bilateral aid for trade (AfT) figures from the OECD Creditor Reporting System (CRS) for a sample of 155 countries over the period 2002-2019, we implement a gravity analysis, to assess whether bilateral aggregate AfT and AfT for trade policy and regulation flows have managed to bolster exports of AfT-recipient countries t...

The economic impacts of COVID-19 were negative across nations but with different degrees depending on the timing, degree of containment measures and the extent of dependency on the world economy. Moreover, the policy response has been heterogeneous across different countries, but mainly addressing urgent and short-term problems without addressing t...

The COVID-19 outbreak has had severe economic consequences across the globe. The crisis emanating from the pandemic has caused demand and supply side shocks, more far reaching than any crisis in living memory. We use a new data set from the 2020/21 Egyptian Industrial Firm Behavior Survey to examine determinants of firms’ resilience during the pand...

This paper empirically investigates the association between global value chains (GVC) participation and countries’ innovation performance. Highlighting the learning effect of foreign knowledge embedded in imported intermediate goods counters the argument that GVC participation is biased towards developed countries with skilled labor abundance. We c...

The COVID-19 outbreak has had severe economic consequences across the globe. The crisis emanating from the pandemic has caused demand and supply side shocks, which are more far reaching than any crisis in living memory. We use a new data set from the 2020/21 Egyptian Industrial Firm Behavior Survey (EIFBS) to examine determinants of firms' resilien...

This paper examines the effect of the quality of institutions on the membership in trade agreements from de jure and de facto perspectives, with a special focus on the Middle East North Africa (MENA) countries. First, for the de jure aspect, we analyze how the quality of domestic institutions in a country affects its likelihood of joining a trade a...

The COVID-19 pandemic saw two sets of policy responses: lockdown to limit spread of the virus, which was a huge demand and supply shock, and government support to firms and individuals to offset the effects of this policy-induced shock. This paper explores the allocation and effectiveness of government support to firms in Egypt. We consider both fi...

Entre 2000 et 2015, l’Afrique a bénéficié d’une croissance soutenue portée par une forte vague d’investissements directs étrangers et marquée par un net recul de la pauvreté [Osman, 2020]. Cependant, il restait à intensifier une transformation structurelle, permettant à la fois d’absorber le surplus de main-d’œuvre agricole, de réduire la dépendanc...

This paper proposes a comprehensive assessment of the effect of different trade barriers (tariffs, non-tariff measures and services restrictions) on wage disparities in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. We look at wage disparities from three dimensions: industry premia, gender-based and skill-based disparities. We use three Labor Mark...

We use data from the 2020/21 Egyptian Industrial Firm Behavior Survey (EIFBS) to assess the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on firm dynamics, behavior and performance. The crisis emanating from the COVID-19 pandemic induced both demand and supply side shocks, which are more far reaching than any crisis in living memory. Our results show that the cri...

We use data from the 2020/21 Egyptian Industrial Firm Behavior Survey (EIFBS) to assess the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on firm dynamics, behavior and performance. The crisis emanating from the COVID-19 pandemic induced both demand and supply side shocks, which are more far reaching than any crisis in living memory. Our results show that the cri...

After more than two decades of regional integration, our chapter evaluates the European Union (EU)-Middle East trade relations through three main angles. First, we examine trade patterns (at both the country and the sectoral levels) to verify if integration led to exports diversification beyond these countries’ traditional exports. Second, we exami...

In the original publication of the article, the research grant information was inadvertently missed in the acknowledgement section. The correct acknowledgment section should read as given below.

The main objective in this paper is to empirically analyze the economic and political determinants of IMF lending in low-and middle-income countries. Compared to the existing literature, our main contribution is twofold. First, using the IMF Monitoring of Fund Agreements (MONA) database, we merge domestic political and institutional factors with in...

Using firm-level data on Egyptian multi-product exporters, this article studies how firms respond to a larger market size and greater competition in the destination country through adjusting their choice of product scope. Our main findings show that market size has a negative impact on the within-firm concentration index, reflecting that firms dive...

This paper tries to examine how the COVID-19 shock affects different countries through their regional integration and their exposure to Global Value Chains (GVCs). Using input-output tables (EORA 2016), our contribution is threefold. First, building on Pahl et al. (2021), we conceptually revise the approaches to analyse input-output relationships....

This paper explores the link between trade liberalization and firms’performance in Egypt combining macro and micro data. Using theEconomic Census of Egypt 2013, we examine the association betweentariffs and non‐tariffs measures (NTM) imposed on intermediate inputsand total factor productivity (TFP). In a first step TFP is estimated as theresidual o...

This paper provides short and long-run estimates of price and income elasticities of Egypt’s natural gas demand using the ARDL bounds testing approach to cointegration over the period 1983–2015. The results show that the long-run income and price elasticities, in absolute values, are greater than their counterparts in the short run. This result is...

Using Egypt firm-level customs data and the World Bank Doing Business data for the period 2005–2016, this paper investigates the impact of administrative barriers to trade on firms' exports. A gravity model is used, and a Poisson-Pseudo Maximum Likelihood regression is estimated to account for the significantly large share of zero trade flows in ou...

This paper assesses the impact of insecurity generated by conflicts on firm performance in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. It contributes to the literature in three ways. First, we try to identify the local effect of conflicts using a geospatial approach where we evaluate the exposure of each firm and its shipment routes and infrast...

This paper explains vagueness in IEAs by the heterogeneity in institutional capacities of the negotiating countries. Using a game-theoretic model, where information regarding institutional capacities of potential participants is asymmetric, this paper makes several important contributions: (i) it contributes to a more realistic modeling of the trea...

This paper investigates the contribution of female labor participation as well female ownership/management to trade margins using firm-level data for 18 manufacturing and services sectors in eight MENA countries for 2013. This topic is innovative, and critical for the MENA region where female participation in the export sector is shy, at a time the...

This paper examines the impact of the antidumping measures initiated by the Government of Egypt on imports during the period 2001–2015. Our contribution is twofold. First, the paper distinguishes between the effect of antidumping measures on the value, the volume and the price of imports. Second, it differentiates between the investigation, destruc...

The paper makes two contributions. First, it analyzes net foreign assets (NFA) and liabilities in selected Arab countries. Second, the paper examines the effects of policy variables that affect the accumulation of NFA and its components, analyzing how the existence of a sovereign wealth fund (SWF), the country's exchange rate regime, and the develo...

This study attempts to assess the effect of Global Value Chains (GVCs) and service liberalization on skill-upgrading. It provides a bridge between two active literatures on GVCs and service liberalization. Using comprehensive firm-level data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey, the contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it focuses on the e...

The objective of the paper is to examine the impact of exports and innovation on the demand for skilled labor in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. In this matter, we contribute to the existing literature in several ways. First, we examine the connection between exports and skill bias through several innovation and technology adoption...

The objective of this chapter is to examine the defensive trade interests of African economies. Hence, we analyzed three value chains where African economies have a defensive interest: the cereals value chain with the three major cereals (wheat, maize, rice) plus cassava, the sugar value chain, and the vegetable oils value chain. Our main findings...

This study assesses the effect of an economy’s business environment on the ability of firms to be part of a global value chain (GVC). With the use of a comprehensive firm-level dataset from the World Bank Enterprise Survey—and with a special focus on the countries of the Middle East and North Africa and East Asia and Pacific regions—the contributio...

The purpose of this article is to assess the relationship between employment intensity and sectoral output growth, to examine whether economic growth was jobless or has created more jobs. Using panel data for 10 sectors over the period 1983-2010 for two Middle Eastern countries; Egypt and Jordan, we estimate employment-value added elasticities at t...

While micro-level empirical evidence has emerged to highlight the positive effect of services deregulation on the productivity and exports of manufacturing firms in developing countries, the MENA region has been neglected in the literature. The current paper fills the gap by exploring the effect of service protection on the extensive and intensive...

This paper examines cyclical characteristics of remittances and explores their counterbalancing and consumption-smoothing potential. First, it uses quarterly data to better reflect the short-term dynamics of consumption and remittances. Second, it uses different methodologies to examine whether the results are robust or not, namely OLS, VAR and SVA...

This study examines the impact of trade openness on job quality, measured by the share of informal and irregular employment in total employment. By combining a microeconomic dataset (the Egyptian Labor Market Panel Survey) with macroeconomic variables (tariffs), we assess the effect of trade reforms on informal/irregular workers in Egypt. Our main...

Using a panel of MENA countries, this paper aims to examine the interaction between exports performance and labor market regulations on employment levels. The theoretical predictions on this literature show that the effects of exports in any given country can be altered by the nature of labor market regulations. Previous studies showed that trade l...

In the 1990s, many MENA countries relied on adjustment and stabilization programs offered by international organizations. Surprisingly, these programs implicitly implied an orientation towards a market economy structure without an explicit adoption of competition laws. This in turn raises questions on the extent to which these programs help adjusti...

This paper examines the effect of the exchange rate devaluation on the quantity and value of exports (intensive margin of trade), as well as the ability to export new products and/or venture into new export markets (extensive margin of trade). Using monthly firm-level and sector-level data for the period 2005-2016, the study is applied to Egypt tha...

This paper attempts to shed the light on the nexus between firms’ productivity and economies of agglomeration in Egypt. Using a large dataset of firms in 342 firms’ four-digit activities in 27 regions (62,108 firms), we introduce three measures of agglomeration which are urbanization or firm diversification measured by the number of firms by govern...

Assets managed by sovereign wealth funds (SWF) have grown nine-fold since 2002, reaching USD 8 trillion in 2018. Around 80% of these investments correspond to cross-border investments. SWFs of Arab countries, mainly oil-rich GCC economies, hold a sizable fraction of these funds (40%). Asset allocation, nevertheless, presents a significant anomaly:...

Despite its several benefits, competition policy seems to lack the attention it deserves in terms of public interest and in terms of research in Arab countries. In the 1990s, many of them started to adopt economic reform programs that were broadly market packages aiming at reducing the role of the state, whereas competition laws mostly appeared in...

This paper explores the relation between institutions and trade in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Although most of the countries suffer from a clear deficit of “good” institutions, the MENA region was neglected in the literature on institutions and trade. This literature offers a broad consensus that poor institutions hamper trade,...

In this paper, we explore the nexus between firms' exports performance and components of the investment climate in Egypt. We include a variety of factors affecting investment, such as political and institutional factors, in addition to factors related to physical infrastructure, macroeconomic policies and competition in the market. We do this for t...

The objective of this report is to evaluate the different EU policies in the industrial and energy sectors in four countries (Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia) based on assessment by local and European stakeholders, and to provide a list of policy recommendations based on these assessments. Adopting a bottom-up approach, such policies are evalua...

The paper examines the impact of Technical Barriers to Trade on firms’ exports in Egypt over the period 2005~2011. Firm-level data for Egypt are combined with the WTO’s TBT-specific trade concerns database. Employing a variant of a gravity model with high-dimensional fixed effects, the impact of Technical Barriers to Trade on firms’ intensive and e...

Reshaping the Euro-Mediterranean relations became a necessity in the aftermath of the Arab Spring in several South Mediterranean Countries (SMCs), including Egypt. The objective of this paper is therefore to study the impact of Egypt-EU Association Agreement on the manufacturing sector and to point out industries with strong potential for export gr...

This study examines the impact of environmental regulations stringency on agricultural trade between European Union (EU) and Middle East and North Africa (MENA countries). Using a gravity model and applying the zero-inflated Poisson (ZIP) model, we estimate the impact of environmental regulations stringency on bilateral agricultural exports between...

This study on trade flows and the impact of EU-Med trade and investment agreements on Euro-Med countries is produced by the team of Research Area 6 of the Euro-Mediterranean Network of Economic Studies (EMNES). The EMNES project is funded by a grant from the European Commission (ENPV/2O14/354-488). The aim of the project is to provide a renewed vis...

The Egyptian economy has been negatively affected by the political instability that the country has witnessed since 2011. Indeed, this instability showed the extent to which the Egyptian economy suffers from several structural imbalances that first amplified the negative effects of the revolution and then delayed its recovery. This paper analyzes b...

Work Package 6 (WP6) of MEDRESET project aims at evaluating the effectiveness and potential of EU policies and measures in industry and energy (including trade liberalization, broader energy policies, energy transition, renewable energy programmes and industrial cooperation initiatives) in light of the interests, needs and expectations of different...

This paper examines the nexus between internal and external imbalances of the Egyptian economy. In fact, both the twin-deficit hypothesis (TDH) and the Feldstein–Horioka (FH) paradox are examined. Using quarterly data (between 2002 and 2014) in order to capture the short-term dynamics that might affect the Egyptian economy, a Granger causality test...

This paper argues that the resource curse in the Arab world is primarily an “institutional curse,” even though it has several macroeconomic manifestations. An empirical investigation, using an augmented growth model, confirms the conditional resource curse hypothesis. The results suggest that on their own, political institutions do not always have...

The article investigates the impact of wars on trade in the Middle East and North African region. Using an augmented gravity model that controls for the endogeneity problem in our estimation, we introduce a war variable and distinguish between different types of conflicts. The results show that wars have a significantly negative impact on exports,...

According to the World Trade Organization (WTO) standards, countries are allowed to adapt regulations under the Sanitary and phyto-sanitary (SPS) and technical barriers to trade (TBT) agreements in order to protect human, animal and plant health, as well as environment and human safety. Yet, these measures can become an impediment in international...

Limited resources and barriers to entry are critically higher for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) than for large companies. One of the reasons explaining why the resources of SMEs are scarce is their limited access to financial services. This in turn reduces the likelihood of exporting. For this reason, using the census of SMEs done by the Cent...

This paper proposes an empirical investigation of the effect of trade liberalization on informality in Egypt. Trade reforms are likely to expose formal firms to a fiercer foreign competition. Consequently, such firms try to reduce labor costs by cutting workers benefits, replacing permanents workers with part-time labor and not providing workers wi...

According to the World Trade Organization (WTO) standards, countries are allowed to adapt regulations under the Sanitary and phyto-sanitary (SPS) and technical barriers to trade (TBT) agreements in order to protect human, animal and plant health, as well as environment and human safety. Yet, these measures can become an impediment in international...

This paper explores the macroeconomic and sectoral effects of goods and service trade on the economic performance of MENA countries for the period 1960–2011. While the MENA region has been widely neglected in the trade and growth literature, this paper offers a decomposition of MENA GDP growth in order to disentangle the contributions of both servi...

This article evaluates the effect of different aspects of trade facilitation in developed and developing countries on bilateral trade through an augmented gravity model and uses the latter to estimate ad valorem equivalents (AVEs) of administrative bathers to trade. The results show that a multitude of trade facilitation variables including interne...

This paper attempts to model trade facilitation in a multi-regional and multi-sectoral computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, MIRAGE. It follows Decreux and Fontagné (2009) in modeling trade facilitation and in assuming that administrative barriers are an iceberg cost. I extend their model using more comprehensive measures of ad-valorem equiva...

This paper develops a microsimulation analysis to evaluate the impact of trade liberalization policies in Egypt on income redistribution. Our analysis aims at identifying the effects of those measures on redistribution aspects. For this, we rely on a macro - micro approach integrating results obtained from a discrete choice model of labor supply in...

Financial services seem to be under-utilised by small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) as only 50% are dealing with banks and benefiting from an improved access to finance. In addition, these firms still face several constraints in terms of access to finance. Using an extensive census that has been recently done by the Egyptian Banking Institute...