Mainstream economics tends to perceive economic systems in a mechanistic way, which makes it impossible to grasp the notion of the irreversibility of real economic processes and thus encourages referring to the achievements of thermodynamics. Although economic equivalents of thermodynamic...

The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) was established in 1989. APEC member countries are remarkably different from each other in many respects. The traditional optimum currency area (OCA) theory may not be suitable for application to APEC. This paper stresses business cycles and trade...