The events of the Arab Spring took the world by surprise: there were no obvious signs of an approaching storm in the Levant and the Maghreb. Objective measures—used on a regular basis—showed that…

Elena Ianchovichina, Martijn Burger, Efstratia Arampatzi |

The agreement reached by 196 countries at Paris to collectively work to limit the growth of global average temperatures to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels is a landmark…

Charles Cormier |

The Climate Change conference in Paris only confirmed what we already knew—that increasingly, there’s an overlap between conventional security threats of a military nature, which are focused on…

Mohamed Abdallah Youness |

Defense budgets are not publicly available, oversight is weak, and information about hidden spending is non-existent, says Transparency International-UK (TI-UK) of defense spending by the 17…

Christine Petré |

The 2014/15 oil price collapse may actually provide an opportunity for the Gulf region to focus on “green” economic thinking and on maximizing energy productivity overall. Given their large…

Waleed Alsuraih |

Over 25, 000 people have descended on the Bourget in the suburbs of Paris to attend the much anticipated 21st Conference of Parties on climate change, or “COP21”. The first meeting today is due to…

Maria Sarraf, Martin Heger |

Estimating national-level growth levels and rates is fraught with challenges. Doing so at subnational levels even more so – because of data challenges, and difficulties in attributing economic…

Apurva Sanghi, Tom Bundervoet, Laban Maiyo |

The conventional wisdom is that low world prices for oil only hurt rich exporting countries, while generating a windfall for poor net importer economies. However, in Central Asia, the story is…

Aurelien Kruse |

If you think about it, snow is a pretty amazing thing. It is nature’s way of storing water in the winter, and then using it in the summer when it is needed, namely during the growing season. If it…

Kulsum Ahmed |

To development economists (like myself), the uprisings that started in Tunisia and spread to several countries in the Arab world in 2010-11 came as somewhat of a surprise.  For the previous decade…

Shanta Devarajan |