Revolution empirics: predicting the Arab Spring

Abstract

The paper examines whether the Arab Spring phenomenon was predictable by complete elimination in the dispersion of core demands for better governance, more jobs and stable consumer prices. A methodological innovation of the Generalized Methods of Moments is employed to assess the feasibility and timing of the revolution. The empirical evidence reveals that from a projection date of 2007, the Arab Spring was foreseeable between 2011 and 2012. The paper contributes at the same time to the empirics of predicting revolutions and the scarce literature on modeling the future of socio-economic events. Caveats and cautions are discussed.

Terrorism and capital flight from Africa

“…The expected sign of this governance indicator depends on whether the distribution of corruptioncontrol is positively or negatively skewed. This is consistent with Asongu and Nwachukwu (2015) who have based their study on bad governance because the governance indicators employed were negatively skewed for the most part. Seventh, in accordance with Asongu (2013a), trade globalization is a natural determinant of capital flight, especially with practices like transfer pricing (Ndikumana & Boyce 2011ab;Asongu, 2015).…”

The Mobile Phone in the Diffusion of Knowledge for Institutional Quality in Sub-Saharan Africa

“…The relevance of unbundling and bundling governance variables is in accordance with an evolving stream of literature on institutional quality in Africa, notably: (i) predicting the Arab Spring based on negative governance signals (Asongu & Nwachukwu, 2015a); (ii) economic governance as the most important determinant of innovation (Oluwatobi et al, 2015) and (iii) governance tools in the fight against software piracy (Andrés & Asongu, 2013) and conflicts/crimes (Asongu & Kodila-Tedika, 2016) in Africa. Beyond the framework of African institutonal literature, the six governnce indicators from Kaufmann et al (2010) have been considered in other branches of governance literature (see Gani, 2011;Andrés et al, 2014;Yerrabit & Hawkes, 2015).…”

“…It is apparent from We briefly devote space to discussing a number of concerns that may be associated with variables obtained from other regressions. According to Asongu and Nwachukwu (2015a), the documented concerns are linked the efficiency and consistency of estimated coefficients as well as validity of corresponding inferences. Pagan (1984, p.242) had established that while two-step estimators are efficient and consistent, few valid inferences can be drawn.…”

Mobile phones in the diffusion of knowledge and persistence in inclusive human development in Sub-Saharan Africa

“…The intuition motivating the inquiry is in accordance with the income catch-up literature that has been substantially documented within the framework of neoclassical growth models (Barro, 1991;Barro & Sala-i-Martin, 1992Mankiw et al, 1992;Baumol, 1986) and recently extended to other fields of economic development, notably, in: (i) negative signals like bad governance, unemployment and inflation (Asongu & Nwachukwu, 2016) and (ii) positive signals like financial market performance (Narayan et al, 2012;Bruno et al, 2012) and inclusive human development (Mayer-Foulkes, 2010;Asongu, 2014b). Both motions build on the assumption of diminishing cross-country dispersions in investigated factors as a basis for the adoption of common policies.…”