Hayder Abbas Drebee

Unemployment is one of the major challenges faced by all countries around theworld, whether developing or developed, due to its direct and indirect impact on economic,social, and political aspects, as well as on poverty and crime rates in those countries. This studyaims to apply the Box-Jenkins methodology (ARIMA) to forecast unemployment rates in theagricultural sector in Iraq for the period 2024-2028, based on a time series representingunemployment rates in the agricultural sector from Q1 2004 to Q4 2023. The study concludedthat the ARIMA (4,1,1) model is the most suitable for forecasting unemployment rates in theagricultural sector, among a set of proposed models, due to its lowest AIC BIC, S.E.Regression and highest adjusted . The study found that unemployment rates in Iraq'sagricultural sector fluctuated between increases and decreases throughout the study period,forming an un-stationary time series, as indicated by the unit root tests (ADF and P-P). In theforecasted period (2024-2028), agricultural sector unemployment rates are expected to slightlydecrease, reaching 16.87% by 2028, down from 18.27% in 2024. This suggests that theunemployment issue in Iraq's agricultural sector will persist. Therefore, the study recommendsthat decision-makers provide a clear strategy to address the spread of unemployment in theagricultural sector and propose solutions to mitigate this issue. These solutions includesupporting investment to create quality job opportunities, promoting local products, providingessential agricultural inputs such as seeds, fertilizers, and machinery, and offering soft loans tounemployed individuals in this sector

Oil is the main source of energy, which plays a pivotal role in the global economy. Therefore, its price fluctuations have a significant impact on the economy of the countries that trade oil. The objective of this study is to investigate the effects of oil price fluctuations on economic growth, financial development and exchange rate in Iraq. To achieve this objective, IRFs and VDCs, which are estimated from VAR, have been used. This study found that great fluctua-tions in economic growth, financial development, and exchange rate are due to oil price fluctuations. It is a reflection of oil resource mismanagement besides the rampant corruption in the state administrations additional to allocating most of financial resources to the war efforts when Iraq fought against terrorism. Therefore, it is necessary for the decision makers to adopt a certain strategy based on reducing the dependence of the Iraqi economy on crude oil. Prompting financial sector by developing well-regulated economic policies of economic diversity is needed as well. It could be done institutionally by regulating frameworks to build confidence in the economy and reducing the dominance of the public sector.

This study aims to measure the impact of governance indicators on corruption in Arab countries during the period 2005-2016. Several techniques including co-integration, forecasting variance error decomposition, and impulse response function are employed. The results indicate that corruption is influenced by political stability, voice and accountability, and regulatory quality in both the short and long runs. The relative contribution of the change in regulatory quality to the change in corruption is weak, implying that there are weaknesses in laws, regulations and transparent legislation that determine the relationship between the state and the society and guarantee the integrity and rights of individuals. Therefore, fighting corruption needs to be an integral part of a comprehensive institutional and organizational reform strategy. This study is an important incentive for governments and global development organizations to improve governance performance to combat corruption. These governments may need external assistance that could be offered by the international development organizations to improve their indicators of good governance of corruption curb if Arab governments are not prepared to improve citizens' participation in this field.

The agricultural sector is an important economic activity in most Arab countries, including Iraq, in terms of its capacity to a large proportion of the total manpower. This makes it a major source of sustenance for a large proportion of the total population. Its contribution to the gross domestic product (GDP) has decreased in the past two decades because of many reasons including irrigation water shortage and the decrease in the total cultivated areas.....etc. However, the impact of corruption, which is one of the economic phenomena that have repercussions on both developed and developing countries, especially countries that are going through difficult circumstances, including Iraq, which leads the most corrupt countries, has been neglected. Therefore, investigating the reasons for the low growth of the agricultural sector is the big goal for decision-makers. This study aims to demonstrate an equilibrium relationship between corruption and the growth of the agricultural sector in Iraq for the period (2004Q2 - 2019Q4) in both short and long runs. To achieve this objective, Johansen and Juselius, and VECM model were used. The study concluded that there is a co-integration between the growth of the agricultural sector and corruption and the existence of a long-run equilibrium relationship between them in the long run. Also, the results found that corruption contributed 29% to the explanation of the changes in the agricultural sector's contribution to the GDP. This indicates the importance of this study and the neglect of previous studies on the impact of corruption on the growth of the agriculture al sector. Therefore, appropriate measures must be taken to develop economic policies to combat corruption for the advancement of the agricultural sector.

This study aims at measuring the efficiency of the colleges at University of Al-Qadisiyah for the academic year 2015-2016. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was employed with alternative models, namely, CRS-I, CRS-O, VRS-I, and VRS-O. The number of enrolled students, lecturers, employees, and teaching assistants were used as inputs, while the number of students with bachelor’s degree and published research in national and international journals were used as outputs. The results indicate that 58% of the colleges reached their optimum economic size according to the efficiency scale since these colleges reached full efficiency. The college of Nursing is a peer college for inefficient colleges. To achieve full efficiency, there must be either significant reductions in their inputs with the same amount of output (input oriented) or significant increases in output retaining the current amount of inputs (output oriented). In general, the efficiency score of University of Al-Qadisiyah indicated the possibility of reducing its available resources by 10% retaining the current amount of output to be efficient, or expanding the University’s output by 1% retaining the current amount of inputs. Therefore, it is imperative that the decision makers at the University of Al-Qadisiyah and its colleges that have not achieved the required efficiency examine the factors that have contributed to this outcome in order to acquire knowledge of weaknesses and imbalances in their inputs and outputs. They could exploit the available resources efficiently by comparing their inputs and outputs with those of peer colleges.