Suchergebnisse

Purpose
During recent years, the long-run relationship between the unemployment rate (UR) and the labor force participation (LFP) rate has been examined in-depth in developed and developing economies. This paper aims to explore this relationship for Iranian women in 31 provinces from 2005Q2 to 2019Q1.


Design/methodology/approach
To examine the existence of a long-run relationship between female LFP and UR, the time-series cointegration approach has been used. Furthermore, regarding the low power of the univariate cointegration approach, the authors consider a panel version of the cointegration tests developed by Westerlund.


Findings
Both time-series cointegration tests and panel cointegration test support the unemployment invariance hypothesis for most Iranian provinces, especially the most religious ones. As it implies an invariance to supply side policies, it seems that reducing legal and cultural barriers could be more relevant to decrease female UR and increase LFP than training programs or R&D policies. The present results also suggest that, for this group of regions, a more centralized policy design could be appropriate, instead of a regional one.


Originality/value
This study investigates whether the unemployment invariance hypothesis holds for Iran, which has not been analyzed before for the Iranian labor market. Moreover, the study adopts a regional approach, which takes into account the huge regional differences in Iran.

AbstractWe examine the effects of oil prices on unemployment rates in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) over the period of 1991–2017. Using the panel nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (panel NARDL) model, the results show that in the long run, positive changes of oil prices exert a positive (increasing) impact on the unemployment rate. However, negative changes in oil prices have a significant decreasing effect on the unemployment rate in the MENA region. We also find that the short run changes in oil prices do not show a significant effect on unemployment rates. Our findings are robust to an alternative measure of oil rents per capita and in line with predictions of the resource curse hypothesis. Countries with higher dependency on natural resource rents experience, on average, a slower long run economic growth rate (and thus higher unemployment rates), compared with countries with lower dependency.

Abstract
Business record keeping, along with business planning, are foundational steps in businesses moving from informal stature to contributing to the capitalization of assets. Thus, the transitioning of informal businesses to business record keeping and planning is significant for economic development. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether there is a relationship between the gender of informal business owners and their engagement in business record keeping and planning in an emerging economy. We take advantage of a unique data set on informal enterprises in Iraq to show that women, versus male, leaders of informal businesses are more likely to adopt business record keeping and formal business planning. Following the foundational theories of Max Weber (Gerth and Mills 2014), we attribute our results to groups that are excluded from dominant relationship networks relying more on rational bureaucracy. Results will be of great interest to scholars and policymakers interested in the impacts of gender differences on financial development.