The present study aims to evaluate the impact of information and communication technology (ICT) on the economic growth of selected developing countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and the Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) region by using a panel Generalized Method of Moment (GMM) growth model over the period 2007-2016. The results extracted from the econometric model show that except fixed telephone, other information and communication technologies such as mobile phone, Internet usage, and broadband adoption are the main drivers of economic growth in MENA and SSA developing countries over the recent period 2007-2016.In addition, our findings confirm the superiority of MENA countries over SSA countries in the areas of Internet usage and broadband adoption. From a policy perspective, the results suggest that authorities in MENA and SSA countries should increase investments in ICT infrastructure. To benefit from the ICT drivers of economic growth, policymakers should enact several important policies that permit the development of financial sectors, provide a more convenient regulatory and institutional environment, increase economy openness, prioritize the allocation of resources to the development of ICT infrastructure, and contain the negative effects of inflation and government consumption.

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This paper measures and analyzes the technical efficiency of Islamic banks in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region during the period 2007-2012. To do this, the bootstrap Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach was employed in order to provide a robust estimation of the overall technical efficiency and its components: pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency in the case of MENA Islamic banks. The main results show that over the period of study, pure technical inefficiency was the main source of overall technical inefficiency instead of scale inefficiency. This finding was confirmed for all MENA Islamic banks as well as for the two subsamples: Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and non-GCC Islamic banks. Furthermore, our results show that GCC Islamic banks had stable efficiency scores during the global financial crisis (2007)(2008) and in the early post-crisis period (2009)(2010). However, a decline in overall technical efficiency of all panels of MENA Islamic banks was recorded in the last two years of the study period (2011)(2012). Thus, we recommend that MENA Islamic bank managers focus more on improving their management practices rather than increasing their sizes. We also recommend that financial authorities in MENA countries implement several regulatory and financial measures in order to ensure the development of MENA Islamic banking.