 Demographic change and economic growth: The role of natural resources in the MENA regionEfstathios Polyzos, Simon Kuck and Khadija Abdulrahman Research in Economics, 2022, vol. 76, issue 1, 1-13 Abstract: This paper analyses the conditional effect of demographic change on economic development in the MENA region. We employ fixed-effects panel analysis on data from 19 countries in the region and demonstrate a negative impact of natural rents on the relationship between the working-age population and economic growth. Once the critical level of approximately 16% of resource rents (as share in total GDP) is reached, a one-unit increase in working-age population appears to harm economic growth. Further tests show that this finding is mainly driven by the negative effects of resource rents on female labor force participation. However, other drivers are a large public sector, low private sector development and inefficient labor market policies and issues such as the “Dutch disease”. The main finding remains after robustness checks in the form of controlling for competing hypotheses. Policy makers are advised to encourage economic diversification, female employment and private sector development. Keywords: Resource rents; Demographic change; Middle East; North Africa; Female labor force participation (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:reecon:v:76:y:2022:i:1:p:1-13 DOI: 10.1016/j.rie.2022.03.001 Access Statistics for this article Research in Economics is currently edited by Federico Etro More articles in Research in Economics from Elsevier |
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