Comments to

1

• Comments to
• Beyond Remittances in the MED
• the financing of local development
• by Romagnoli-Mengoni
• Are there Shorfalls in MENA Trade?
• by Miniesy-Nugent
• Giuseppe De Arcangelis
• University of Rome La Sapienza

2
Beyond Remittances...

• Main question of the paper Can Migration Help
  LED in the MED? How?
• Remittances, (i) to finance physical and human
  capital accumulation, but also consumption (ii)
  labor substitution effect
• Accumulation of skills, conditional to return
  migration
• Numerous examples reported from the literature
  (Mesnard, 2004 Dustmann-Kirchkamp, 2003 etc.)

3
Beyond Remittances ...

• Excellent overview and presentation of the
  material
• Open questions
• Is there a MED specificity?
• Can migration be particularly helpful in the MED,
  or not? Why?
• Possible failures on the MED migrants' side (i)
  low saving rate, (ii) low altruism, (iii) low
  probability of return
• Possible failures in the local environment (i)
  scarse market mechanisms, (ii) lack of
  functioning institutions, etc.

4
Beyond Remittances ...

• Regarding A), there does not seem to be major
  differences with respect to other nationalities
• Much more should be done to improve B)
• Discussion on this

5
Are there Shortfalls...

• Main question Is MENA intra-trade and world
  trade below or above potential?
• Motivation trade and growth linkage
• Impressive dataset!!!
• Inclusion of many interesting additional
  variables to the original gravity (e.g. the
  government indicator)

6
Are there Shortfalls...

• Interpretation of MENA2 and MENA2_World an
  effect on the intercept term for belonging to the
  MENA countries,...
• but not on the slope what about if the slope is
  higher for some covariates?
• Discussion what can explain the difference
  between trade potential and actual trade?
• Some other technical questions
• Why not including an importer and exporter
  distinction?
• How do you deal with time-invariant variables
  (i.e. distance or area) in the panel estimation?