WhatsApp is a widely used social media app, growing in popularity across the Middle East, and the most popular in Saudi Arabia. In this paper, we investigate the usage of WhatsApp as an educational support tool in a Saudi university. An online survey was constructed to ascertain how students and staff feel about and utilize WhatsApp as part of their daily studies. It also aimed to gather their thoughts on other platforms offered by the university such as Blackboard and email. The survey was tested and the results analyzed for frequency distributions, mean score, and standard deviation. Our results from nearly 200 student and staff members reveals that WhatsApp is heavily utilized for a variety of educational support tasks and greatly preferred over the other platforms. We propose that WhatsApp has good potential to support not only student coordination, information dissemination and simple enquiries but also to support formal teaching and out-of-class learning.

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This paper empirically investigates the relationship between corruption, political instability and economic growth. We first show how these variables interact by allowing for bidirectional causality between each two of the three variables for which we employ a panel VAR model on a dataset of 140 countries over the period of 1990-2017. Then, we exploit the incidence of the Arab Spring, as an exogenous shock, to measure the short-term effects of political shocks on corruption levels, political stability and economic growth using the differencesin-differences (DiD) framework.

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