This article examines a typical dilemma that vexes hospitality private equity investors: Is the critical current situation an opportunity or a threat? To be able to resolve this conundrum, the author analyzes the stepping-stones of the private equity investment process: understanding what was behind the tourism sector crisis and the key requirements for finding suitable solutions; analyzing, at a later stage, the valuation process; and providing recommendations to undertake profitable investments in a distressed hospitality sector.
The paper introduces and demonstrates different uses of the Arab Spatial Policy Analyzer (ASPA), a new online policy database for the analysis of food and nutrition security in the Middle East and North Africa region. Using the ASPA database, we assess the nature of policy activity throughout the Arab region, specifically during the 2008 global food price crisis and the 2011 social uprisings. The ASPA is a means for identifying broadly those policy areas where governments are active and can help analysts, researchers, and decisionmakers discern what policy actions governments are undertaking to bring about stability and prosperity for their people. The ASPA database draws from a variety of sources: country reports of the Economist Intelligence Unit; datasets of the World Bank Food Price Crisis Observatory, the FAO Food and Agriculture Policy Decision Analysis Tool, and FAOLEX Legal Office; and the Global Agriculture Information Network reports of the US Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agriculture Service. The database has several distinct features when compared to other policy monitoring tools, including a novel policy classification system and policy directions indicating either an increasing or decreasing value for determinate policy instruments – for example, an increase in food subsidies. We find that in times of crisis governments in the Middle East and North Africa region focus on “firefighting” policies that neglect both fiscal prudence and interventions with more impact, such as investments in infrastructure and targeted social protection measures.
This paper uses Synthetic Control Methodology to estimate the output loss in Tunisia as a result of the “ArabSpring.” The results suggest that the loss was 5.5 percent, 5.1 percent, and 6.4 percent of GDP in 2011, 2012, and 2013 respectively. These findings are robust to a series of tests, including placebo tests, and are consistent with those from an Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model of Tunisia’s economic growth. Moreover, this paper finds that investment was the main channel through which the economy was adversely impacted by the Arab Spring.