<p><p>The thesis examines the foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and, in order to achieve a better understanding of how MENA economies may attract FDI, attempts to identify their possible location-specific de-terminants. The analysis is based on the results of the cross-section OLS regression meth-od. The examined empirical model is based on the eclectic theory developed by John Dun-ning and the previous empirical studies. To test the relevant location-specific determinants of FDI inflows into MENA region, eighteen countries are sampled for the period 1996-2006. The results of the regression analysis show that physical infrastructure and trade openness are significant determinants of FDI in the MENA countries.</p></p>

Bachelor's thesis. / Format: PDF. Bibl.

The aim of the present study is to cast new light on the nature of definiteness marking in Moroccan Arabic (MA). Previous work on the dialect group has described its definiteness system as similar to that of other Arabic varieties, where indefinite entities are unmarked and a "definite article" /l-/ modifies nouns to convey a definite meaning. Such descriptions, however, do not fully account for the behavior of MA nouns in spontaneous natural speech, as found in the small self-collected corpus that informs the study: on one hand, /l-/ can and regularly does co-occur with indefinite meanings; on the other, a number of nouns can exhibit definiteness even in the absence of /l-/. In response to these challenges, the study puts forth an alternate synchronic description the system, arguing that the historical definite article */l-/ has in fact lost its association with definiteness and has instead become lexicalized into an unmarked form of the noun that can appear in any number of semantic contexts. Relatedly, the study argues that the historically indefinite form *Ø has come under heavy syntactic constraints and can best be described as derived from the new unmarked form via a process of phonologically conditioned disfixation, represented {- /l/}. At the same time, MA has also apparently retained an older particle ši and developed an article waħəd, both of which can be used to express different types of indefinite meanings. To support the plausibility of this new description, the study turns to the linguistic history of definiteness in MA, describing how a combination of internal and external impetuses for change likely pushed the dialect toward article loss, a development upon which semantic reanalysis and syntactic restructuring of other forms then followed. If the claim that MA no longer overtly marks definiteness is indeed correct, the study could have a significant impact on work that used previous MA descriptions to make grammaticality judgments, as well as be of value to future work on processes of grammaticalization and language contact. / text

Through quantitative and qualitative methods, this dissertation endeavors to explain why the rate of female labor force participation (FLFP) in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is the lowest in the world. Using panel data models for fifty-four developing countries over thirty-five years, the first essay suggests that the most likely factor affecting the rate of FLFP negatively in MENA is the institution of patriarchy. Being part of MENA, which is characterized primarily by the institution of patriarchy, is associated with lower than average FLFP. Oil income appears to have a positive effect on FLFP for countries outside MENA but no effect for countries inside MENA. Moreover, Muslim countries outside MENA do not have lower than average FLFP, while Muslim countries in MENA do. Using ten proxies for patriarchy, the second essay quantifies patriarchy in order to compare MENA countries with the rest of the world. Using principle component analysis (PCA), the study measures patriarchy for fifty-nine developing countries over thirty years. The technique creates three main components for patriarchy, namely; the gender gap in education and demography, children’s survival rate, and participation in public spheres. The results show that MENA has the highest level of patriarchy with regard to women’s participation in public spheres, education and demography compared with non MENA countries. The region’s culture and religion seem to be associated with high levels of patriarchy in MENA. The third essay focuses on women’s unpaid work as well as women’s participation in the informal sector in MENA. The results point to a severe undercounting of women’s work. Since women are expected to provide care and produce goods and services for their family at home, women do not participate in the formal labor force in large numbers. Because of the patriarchal culture, patriarchal family laws and labor laws, many women including educated women have to choose to work in the informal sector in MENA. Since women’s unpaid work and their participation in the informal sector are not recorded in labor statistics, the MENA region appears to have a lower rate of FLFP than it does in reality.

Thesis (PH. D.)--Catholic University of America, 1931. / Vita. Description based on print version record. "Select bibliography": p. ix-xii.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Catholic University of America. / Description based on print version record. "Select bibliography": p. ix-x.

Ce travail doctoral, mené dans le cadre d'une recherche-action pour l'Institut de prospective économique du monde méditerranéen, s'inscrit dans les études sur la régionalisation euro-méditerranéenne. L'une des caractéristiques de l'intégration des régions Nord-Sud est le rôle central que les firmes multinationales, en tant qu'entités spatiales, tiennent dans le processus. Les travaux sur l'intégration nord-américaine (Alena) et asiatique (zone Asean + 3) révèlent que l'intensification des échanges régionaux s'est accompagnée de la mise en place d'un système productif intégré entre les pays les plus développés et les moins développés de l'ensemble. Cette recomposition régionale des systèmes productifs, impulsée par les firmes du Nord qui tirent parti des avantages comparatifs et de la proximité des pays du Sud, est l'indice d'une intégration « en profondeur ». La thèse pose la question de savoir si l'on peut observer une intégration par le tourisme comparable, dans laquelle les firmes touristiques occuperaient une place primordiale. La prise en compte de la dimension productive du tourisme ouvre la voie à une telle comparaison à l'échelle euromaghrébine. Par le volume d'activité qu'elles engendrent et par le mode de production qu'elles privilégient au Maroc et en Tunisie, les firmes touristiques fixent les grandes structures spatiales du marché régional tout en contribuant à la diffusion au Sud de la réglementation européenne de l'économie touristique. Leur rôle dans l'intégration régionale présente cependant des limites, liées à l'évolution des mobilités et des pratiques touristiques, ainsi qu'aux problématiques de gouvernance que suscite leur action, notamment à l'heure des révolutions arabes. / This doctoral research was conducted within the framework of an action research for the Institute of Economic Forecasting of the Mediterranean World and is a contribution to Euro-Mediterranean regionalization studies. One of the particularities of North-South markets integration has to do with the role multinational companies play in the process as, spatial entity. Empirical studies on Asean Plus Three and Nafta processes demonstrate that the growth of regional trade has been aided by implementing integrated production systems that engage both Northern and Southern countries of the region. This retooling of regional production processes has been led by multinational firms seeking to benefit from comparative advantages and geographic proximity of less-developed neighboring countries. In so doing, they have fostered integration within the North-South production space. This thesis explores whether such a process can be emulated in the tourism sector, driven by leading multinational players, as has been the case in other conventional industrial sectors, at Euro-Maghreb scale. European tourism firms have played a dominant role in establishing the broad structures of the regional market while contributing to the diffusion of European economic norms to the South. Nevertheless, their ability to further develop integration faces obstacles such as shifting market demand determinants as seen in the ongoing evolution of tourist mobility and motivation, as well as issues related to business environment and regulatory framework particularly in this post-Arab Spring era.

The critical essay gained immense popularity in the sixties and seventies in the Maghrib as a way to depict national realities that had failed to live up to nationalist ideals. Their authors often shared similar attributes: young highly educated intellectuals, committed toward modernity and who steered clear of politics. Such was the case of Abdallah Laroui (born 1933) and Hichem Djaït (born 1935), two celebrated Maghribi thinkers of the post-1967 generation in Arab thought. Despite their different ideological positions, they share a similar trajectory and both wrote about the need for another Arab renaissance, in Laroui's La crise des intellectuels arabes (1974) and Djaït's La personnalité arabo-islamique (1974). The turn to critical writing is routinely dismissed for being secondary, for having a restricted audience and little political impact, yet it highlights well the Maghribi postcolonial intellectual's competing demands: to conform to an ideal representation of intellectual "commitment" through critical speech, and to secure national recognition and integration. As such, this thesis confronts the often-neglected impact of nationalism on intellectual conducts after independence around the impact of their disillusionment, and forces us to rethink critically notions of engagement, the role of intellectuals and postcolonial cultural productions that are current in Middle East studies, and problematically envisaged by postcolonial studies. These texts have been approached as dynamic objects responding to a set of questions in their time, to account for the materiality of thought production, mobilising David Scott's concept of the "problem-space of intellectual production" (1999). This thesis looks at Abdallah Laroui and Hichem Djaït's intellectual projects from 1965 to 1978, to study the genesis and aftermaths of their critical moment, focusing on their published writings (critical essays and academic studies), press and journal articles, interviews, and fictional texts from a later period, in Arabic and French. Their writings will be read alongside several cultural journals, newspapers and memoirs dealing with this period of the Maghrib's history to account for the processes of circulation and reception by relevant audiences.

This dissertation explores the role of female political actors in the gendered rebuilding of Tunisia’s post-Ben Ali political infrastructure and how gender both informed and featured in the early stages of the democratic transition. Drawing on thirteen months of fieldwork and over 300 hours of interviews, it narrates a yet untold story of the transformation of female political actors from object to subject of the state. In the post-revolutionary political terrain, gender and women’s rights were imbued with broader discursive significance, becoming a vehicle through which to distinguish two broad political categories of Islamism and secularism, which showcased continuity with the historical deployment of gender in pre-independence and post-colonial authoritarian contexts. However, analysis of the development of gender parity legislation from its introduction in the interim electoral law in advance of the 2011 elections, through the constitutional and electoral law drafting processes, and its implementation in the 2014 elections, reveals the inadequacy of gender as a metaphor for broad political characterisations and the fluidity of the Tunisian political terrain as seen through a gendered lens. It was only through the collaborative work of female political actors across the ideological spectrum within the National Constituent Assembly that the foundational texts of the Second Republic were gendered, acknowledging and addressing the ways that the lived experiences of women, as socially and historically constituted subjects, can mediate access to rights. By virtue of this process, these female deputies, whose own subjectivities were transformed through interaction with male-dominated political institutions, enacted and embodied new modes of the female citizen as subject. Finally, in tracing the development of the gender parity laws through the formative years of Tunisian democracy, this dissertation illuminates the ways in which access to newly democratised political power remains gendered, mediated through the complex interplay between larger political, social, and economic structures.

This essay consists of a case study of Tunisian democratization process which came along the events of the Arab spring in 2010-11. The aim of the research is to understand why Tunisia took a distinctive path during the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa in 2010-11. The case study is within the theoretical framework of traditional democratization literature. These theories are modernization theory, historical sociology and the agency approach. Using the methodological approach of qualitative content analysis, I have analyzed academic articles and come to the conclusion that seven factors played a crucial role for democracy in Tunisia: (1) increased level of education, (2) increased level of information, (3) existing formal and informal organizations in the civil society, (4) transnational power structure, (5) the size of coercive apparatus, (6) compromises among political actors and (7) existing political community. I argue that both the structure of the civil society and the political foundation in Tunisia played a vital role for the distinctive path it took towards democracy.