The dramatic implosion and regionalization of international trade during the 1930s has often been blamed on the trade and foreign exchange policies that emerged in the interwar period. We provide new evidence on the impact of trade and currency blocs on trade flows from 1928 1938 that suggests a...

Recent proposals for enlarging the European Community to include the EFTA countries raise the question of whether the new members should participate in a European Monetary Union. In part, the issue hinges on the incidence of aggregate supply and demand disturbances. We use data on prices and...

After decades of rising global economic integration, the world economy is now fragmenting. To measure this phenomenon, we introduce an index of geopolitical fragmentation derived from various empirical indicators. This index is developed using a flexible dynamic factor model with time-varying...

International economic integration yields large potential welfare effects, even in a static constant returns competitive world economy. Our method is novel. The effect of border barriers on trade flows is often inferred from gravity models. But their rather atheoretic structure precludes welfare...

This paper characterizes the integration patterns of international currency unions (such as the CFA Franc zone and the East Caribbean Currency Area). We empirically explore different features of currency unions, and compare them both to countries with sovereign monies, and to regions within...

This paper reaches seven conclusions regarding the Yen Bloc that Japan is reputed to be forming in Pacific Asia. (1) Gravity-model estimates of bilateral trade show that the level of trade in East Asia is biased intra-regionally, as it is within the European Community and within the Western...

In his papers during the lead up to the birth of the European Monetary Union, Obstfeld considered whether the countries forming the EMU were sufficiently similar to survive a single monetary policy--and more importantly, whether they had the capacity to adjust to asymmetric shocks given a single...

In the United States, many industries have a Silicon Valley-type geographic localization. In Europe, these same industries often have four or more major centers of production. This difference is presumably the result of the formal and informal trade barriers that have divided the European...

In a previous analysis of the West African Monetary Union, Macedo(1985a), size is taken to be a major structural characteristic of a country in the sense that large countries are not affected by disturbances originating in small countries but small countries are affected by large countries'...

At a time of historic challenges to the viability of the Eurozone, we assess the contribution of the EU and the Euro to equity market integration in Europe. We use a simple and essentially model free measure of bilateral market segmentation: two countries are segmented if there is a wide...