Nadine Yamout received her PhD in Economics in 2019 from the University of New South Wales, Australia. She holds an MA in Financial Economics and a BA in Economics from the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Economics at the American University of Beirut. Prior to that, Nadine was an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Sydney between 2021-2022 and a post-doctoral research associate at the University of Sydney between 2019-2020. Her research interests include open economy macroeconomics, applied macroeconometrics, and monetary and fiscal policies, with a focus on understanding the behavior of economies undergoing structural changes. Her current research focuses on the implications of a slowdown in growth for fiscal policy, the role of structural transformation in driving the dynamics of unemployment in open economies, and debt sustainability analysis in developing economies.
Public debt is piling up across the Middle East and North Africa after years of political upheavals, economic shocks and the Covid-19 pandemic. With fiscal space shrinking, governments are under pressure to act. This column explains why for many countries in the region, the room for manoeuvre on the public finances may be smaller than policy-makers think. Urgent action is needed to restore debt sustainability.