Stability of the Demand for Money in the Middle East

Previous studies that have estimated the money demand function in Middle Eastern countries employed either traditional estimation techniques or recently popularized cointegration techniques. The first group suffers from spurious regression problems; the second group interprets cointegration as a sign of stability of the estimated parameters. Without a comprehensive study in the literature about the Middle East, this paper incorporates the cumulative sum and cumulative sum squared tests into cointegration analysis and shows that in the majority of the countries in the sample, the demand for money (M2) is stable.