For almost two decades, regional integration in the post-Soviet space has remained one of the most talked about issues of economic policy. There are hundreds of initiatives and projects that aim for deepened co-operation between countries in the region. At the same time, to determine the...

The European Union (EU) has become an icon of successful regional integration. Despite this success, the on-going integration process has two different speeds; while economic integration has been fast, steady, and assertive, political integration has been slow and demoralizing at times. This is...

Economic integration is defined as the elimination of economic borders between two or more savings. In turn, an economic border demarcation over which any actual or potential mobility of goods, services and factors of production and communication flows, is relatively low. On both sides of a...

The overview analyses the results of the country studies undertaken by the ILO’s Asian Employment Programme with the aim of contributing to the evolution of a policy framework for labour intensive development for ASEAN. These country study results are examined in the context of the...

The profit and loss sharing system allows bank to share risk with client in Islamic banks. Moreover Islamic banks are required to operate as per Islamic Rules and principles. Unlike Islamic banks, conventional banks operate based on interest. The income of conventional banks is the difference...

This paper extends the unit root test of Christopoulos and Leòn-Ledesma (2010) to accommodate not only structural breaks and non-linear mean reversion, but also the contemporaneous cross-sectional dependence commonly found in panel dataset. The proposed test presents good finite sample...

Thanks to a level of growth in foreign investment, the gap is narrowing between Romania and other East European countries like the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary, countries normally considered the preferred choice of foreign investors. In the last years, Romania has become a more appealing...

The present analysis deals with the relationship of the EU budget and its resources with the Lisbon process. The EU Commission speaks for many years about a lack of transparency in financial relations between Member States and the EU. It even says that the current system fulfils very well the...

This study is a contribution to the debate on the relationship between FDI and growth. The idea that the alleged link between FDI and growth is rather the consequence of both FDI and growth responding endogenously to economic integration is tested empirically. The results confirm precisely this...

In this paper, we document the main factors underlying the foreign portfolio inflows to Gulf Corporation Council countries (hereafter GCC) by employing a recently published database of cross-country portfolio holdings by the International Monetary Fund. We find that bilateral factors such as...