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C13, C21, R11, R12,

The literature on remittance flows has relatively little information on the impacts of remittance outflows on countries. The Russian Federation consistently ranks among the top remittance senders in the world, however the Russian case remains a largely unstudied area. This article addresses this gap. The findings show that remittance outflows are still very small compared with GDP and that the Russian economy will continue to need foreign labour. So-called push factors in neighbouring countries will also continue to make the Russian Federation an attractive workplace for foreign workers. The authors encourage the Government of the Russian Federation to take pre-emptive measures for both political and economic reasons, such as offering more investment opportunities for expatriate workers.

The Middle East has seen much more economic change over the past few decades than sociopolitical change in spite of the continuous political instability that is often highlighted by the press. Collectively the region is best known for producing and exporting oil. While the oil industry significantly impacts the region through generating wealth and movement of labor, it also has become the agent of change for endeavors such as development and diversification. With higher rates of growth occurring more in the East than the West, the Middle East sits on the crossroads of this divide acting as a bridge between these two market places.This series is dedicated to highlighting the challenges and opportunities that lie within and around this central region of the global economy. It will be divided into four broad areas: resource management (covering topics such as oil prices and stock markets, history of oil in the region; water; labor migration; remittances in the region), international trade and finance (covering topics such as role of foreign direct investment in the region; Islamic banking; exchange rate and investments), growth and development (covering topics such as social inequities; knowledge creation; growth in emerging markets), and lastly demographic change (covering topics such as population change; women in the labor market; poverty and militancy).

We analyze a set of countries which adopted inflation targeting (IT) as a policy tool. We model the pre-IT period with ARMA and GARCH methods, and conduct the one-step ahead forecasting for the remainder of the times series data. The actual and forecasted inflation levels are compared for each country. We find that even though the actual inflation levels are lower than the forecasted ones, there is no statistical evidence to suggest that the adoption of IT causes a structural break in the inflation levels of the countries which adopt IT.Inflation targeting, international comparison, forecasting,

In this article, we study the influence of the room properties, hotel amenities, hotel location, and, more importantly, the characteristics of hotels in the surrounding area on the prices of hotel rooms. The effects of different determinants are estimated using the hedonic price model for a cross-section of 250 hotels in Dubai. In addition to the typical characteristics of hotels and hotel rooms such as hotel amenities, star rating, and room size, we include location-specific characteristics such as accessibility to public transportation, airport, and, more importantly, clustering variables to capture the effects of local competition and spillovers from surrounding hotels. Our results indicate significant and strong effects of accessibility to attractions, transportation, hotel’s star rating, and room size, as expected. Our estimations also indicate that local competition reduces the room price, and local quality spillover increases the room price, and both effects are predominantly limited to the hotel’s immediate surroundings. Our estimations indicate that having one more hotel in the immediate surroundings decreases the room price by about one percent, and an increase in the average quality of the hotels in the immediate surroundings by one star rating increases the room price by more than 20%.

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