Introduction

For many years the monetary policy frameworks in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region were largely both unchanging and unstudied. On the one hand, most MENA countries kept their currencies pegged to the US dollar, which restricted the scope for independent monetary or macro policy. On the other hand, most research was focused elsewhere. It is striking, for example, that none of the three main general treatments of economic development in the region – Richards and Waterbury (2008), Noland and Pack (2007) and Devlin (2010) – include chapters on countries’ monetary policy frameworks or financial systems.