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This paper aims at analysing the relationship between exports and economic growth in the Arab countries using annual data for the period 1970-1999. Section two of this study presents a theoretical background of the relationship between exports and economic growth. Literature review is found in Section 3. In Section 4, the methodological issues of studying this relationship are discussed. Results of stationarity tests using Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) and Phillips-Perron (PP) as well as Bivariate Johansen-Juseluis tests for cointegration are presented in Section 5. Stationarity tests suggest that time series are non-stationary in their levels and seem to be stationary in their first differences. Testing for long-run cointegration relationship using Johansen-Juseluis approach, it is found that in general there is no cointegration relationship between exports and GDP. For this reason, we abandoned the error correction model and tested for causality using different versions of Granger’s causality test. We found mixed results about the causal relationship between exports and GDP in Arab countries.

This paper is trying to analyze the determinants of housing prices in an oil-based economy, where the price of oil plays a major role in such economies. It is also common to find that government spending represents the most important component of aggregate spending and that governments usually play a central role in the provision of public services to citizens at substantial subsidies, housing is on top of them. The paper is trying to identify the role played by oil price in the housing market in Kuwait. The model is composed of four major determinants of house prices including the price of oil, government expenditures, inflation rate and interest rate. Results confirm the role played by the four factors in determining the price of houses. Variance decomposition indicates that up to 10 quarters, 94.3% of the forecast error variance in housing prices is explained by house price itself, whereas, only 2.3%, 1.6%, 1.5% and 0.8% are explained by Interest rates, inflation rates, government expenditures, and price of oil respectively. The oil price does not seem to play an important impact on price changes in Kuwait. One important recommendation is for the government to relax its monopoly on land and invite the private sector to come up with housing solutions to increase the supply of houses in the private housing market and reduce the upward pressures on house prices.

The aim of this paper is to empirically investigate the sources of inflation in Egypt. For this, price dynamics is herein represented by a vector error-correction model, which we use to test for the existence of a long-run relationship between the consumer price index, real gross domestic product (GDP), the exchange rate, interest rate, money supply and world prices. Then using the augmented VAR approach, we test for Granger non-causality between the different variables and inflation. The main results that are of interest to monetary policy in Egypt suggest that structural reforms based on improving the country's productive capacity, shrinking the budget deficit and credit to the government, are crucial for controlling inflation.

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