Hamid Mohtadi from University of Wisconsin an University of Minnesota was the discussant of two papers about role of government spending in economic growth, presented at the ERF 24th Annual Conference.
The two papers were using more up-to-date methodologies and techniques to ask an old classical question: whether government spending is a good thing for economies to grow or whether it detracts from the economic growth. While some say it's good, other say it's bad, and some say there is a sort of an optimal level of spending where economic growth can be maximized.
According to Prof. Mohtadi, the papers were very topical in terms of their importance and they used interesting data. One of the papers focused only on five MENA countries for a 30/40 year period; the other used a larger number of countries and looked at the shorter data point. Each of the paper found that there were sort of a threshold level of spending beyond which is not so efficient to spend a lot of money.
The Economic Research Forum’s 24th Annual Conference is held in Cairo, Egypt, on 8-10 July, 2018. The main theme of the plenary sessions is “The New Normal in the Global Economy: Challenges and Prospects for MENA”. The conference aims to draw on the lessons learned from the restructuring of the economic order across the region, particularly in light of the wide-ranging consequences of the decline in oil prices. With social turbulence and conflict persist in several MENA countries, the main goal is adequately reconciling short-term social and economic concerns with long-term growth and reform efforts. Visit the conference website to find out more about the event and access papers, videos and blogs.
