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The eternal question posed by students, “Why do I have to learn this?” is being answered for them every day in the newspapers and on television with respect to the balance of liberty and security in time of war. Teachers often express the need for focused materials that approach this question from both historical and modern perspectives, and this high-school lesson provides that. The Latin maxim, Inter arma enim silent leges, translated, “In time of war the laws are silent” expresses the doctrine that security trumps liberty in wartime, but in this lesson, student will ask, “Is liberty necessarily the price of security? How have United States governments justified the curtailment of liberty in wartime?” This lesson presents students and teachers with hands-on focus activities, student manipulatives and role-plays, and primary source document analyses that will lead students to appraise the cost of security and whether the Constitution can be preserved by being abridged.

Economists usually try to avoid making moral judgements, at least in their professional capacity. Positive economics is seen as a way of analysing economic problems, in as scientific a manner as is possible in human sciences. Economists are often reluctant to be prescriptive, most seeing their task as presenting information on the various options, but leaving the final choice, to the political decision taker. The view of many economists is that politicians can be held responsible for the morality of their actions when making decisions on economic matters, unlike unelected economic advisors, and therefore the latter should limit their role.

The purpose of this paper is to examine to what extent evidence can be found for the presence of the Marshall–Lerner (ML) condition regarding the trade balances of Egypt. The theoretical basis of the ML is presented and then tested using Egyptian trade data from 1965 to 2017.

The data are analysed via standard ordinary least squares models subject to the constraints imposed by economic theory, specifically ML theory, in which the coefficients represent elasticities. A range of tests are undertaken to establish the validity of the models and the model results including multicollinearity, unit root and co-integration in order to avoid spurious regressions.

The export model strongly suggests that real exports of Egyptian goods and services are elastic with respect to changes in the real effective exchange rate (REER), with a coefficient weight of −1.64 and is significant at 1%. However, for the import model the coefficient weight of the REER −1.17 and is significant at 1%. This result contradicts ML theory, where an increase in the REER makes imports cheaper and thus causes them to increase.

The limitations of the study are two in particular, the first is that the frequency of the data employed is annual, not monthly or even quarterly, which means that the sample size would have been larger, and the estimated parameters could have been more accurate in forecasting the future behaviour of exports and imports. There could be several other indicators that might have clear impacts on exports and imports. In other words, it is possible that a model with consumer spending and government spending as well as terms of trade, inflation, interest rate spread and taxes is going to capture more of the variation that occurs in Egypt's trade balance components.

The results suggest that the Egypt-International Monetary Fund plan (depreciation) is likely to have a positive effect on the economy. However, this does not mean that the deficit of the trade balance is going to change into a surplus once the policies of the plan are fully applied, but it does mean the deficit will reduce. Only in the long run is the trade balance likely to record a sustainable surplus. But the latter will heavily depend on the structure of exports and imports and maintaining price stability, both of which are key government policy areas.

The paper builds on previous theoretical and empirical work in this field and in particular is focussed on Egypt. There are extremely few analyses of the ML condition regarding Egypt. This paper provides new information on this and can also be utilized by researchers to further develop the analysis and method through identification of other potentially relevant variables within a single country ML study.

William Amasa Scott was in his time well-known as a monetary economist as well as a popularizer of economic ideas, whose opinions were widely regarded by the public. A proponent of Austrian economics and defender of classical economic theory, he soon found a home at the School of Economics, Political Science and History (later the School of Economics) at the University of Wisconsin which, while initially a mainstream department, would evolve into the citadel of Institutional Economics. Notwithstanding his status as an authority on monetary economics and his place as a public intellectual, he remained at the University something of an outsider throughout his career and today is largely forgotten.

Identifying if aid flows have contributed to economic growth or growth divergence between a sample of Asian and African countries is the purpose of this paper. Using data over the period of 1980–2015, the paper attempts to establish whether aid, in any of its forms, has played a role in economic growth in these countries.

A comprehensive literature analysis over the past 70 years sets the scene for the paper. A panel data fixed-effects model is applied for each sample (Africa and Asia) between 1980 and 2015. Both theoretical predictions and empirical studies are used to derive the independent variables selected for modelling.

The findings strongly suggest that aid flows in both the Asian and African samples have no relation at all to either long-run growth paths or growth divergence. However, there is a suggestion in the case of the Africa sample that governance decline may well be the primary source of growth divergence.

This result cannot be generalised because it only focuses on six countries but as demonstrated in the paper, other possible samples (from both regions) actually make no difference to the results. It could also be argued (given the comprehensive literature analysis presented here) that it is not essential to have a theoretical relationship between aid and growth because aid is given to different countries with very different characteristics, needs, governance and policy environments.

Donor countries must play a more supervisory role to ensure aid flows are directed to the right channels in recipient countries. Aid should be given to countries which have a certain degree of macroeconomic stability and “good” policy to ensure effectiveness. They also need to pay attention to the sectoral distribution of aid as do recipient countries to better allocate aid flows to productive sectors that contribute to both short- and long-term growth.

These are not given much emphasis in this paper.

Most aid–growth studies are based on a large number of countries from different regions with different characteristics or on a single country case. This paper compares between two samples of countries sharing the same characteristics to overcome the heterogeneity problem. This paper is based on a more protracted time series from 1980 to 2015 to capture more accurately the impact of foreign aid on economic growth.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the indicators of currency crises in Egypt. Using the annual data over the period 1977–2017, the paper attempts to establish which economic variable(s) are more useful in predicting currency crises and to improve the predictability of such crises.

Probit analysis is employed to identify the indicators that are most effective in predicting the probability that a currency crisis episode will occur. This is enabled through the estimation of a market turbulence index (MTI) which measures currency crises in terms of eight “threshold” points at which a crisis is detected or not detected.

The estimates of the probit model suggest that five variables: the domestic interest rate spread; domestic current account; USA interest rate; real exchange rate; and the real interest rate have the strongest predictive power among the 16 indicators identified in the empirical literature.

There are a number of limitations associated with this paper. First the data are annual and not monthly which limits the ability of the estimated model to accurately predict the crisis episodes. There is limited open access to monthly data on the Central Bank of Egypt website especially for the period before the 2000s. Were such data available this would allow for much more robust in-sample and out of sample forecasts.

The analysis and results in the paper suggest that the modelling strategy employed represents a potentially useful tool for Central Banks and policy makers in forecasting currency crises.

There are several such implications but mainly in relation to the possibility of avoiding high social costs resulting from a currency crisis that may have been avoided if forecast correctly.

The paper builds on previous theoretical and empirical work in this field while adding to the literature in terms of the problems in previous literature and modelling approaches. It also strongly advocates the use of the MTI instead of other indices to identify such crises.