Regional economic integration is both a deregulatory project, involving the removal of barriers to the movement of goods and services, as well as a re-regulatory project, involving the adoption of common economic, social, and environmental standards to enable the market to function. The removal...

This paper examines and evaluates macroeconomic forecasts for the original ASEAN-5 members in the context of a global vector autoregressive (GVAR) model covering 20 countries, grouped into nine countries/regions. After estimating the GVAR model, we generate 12 one-quarter-ahead forecasts for the...

This paper examines capital controls in two ways. First, it assesses whether capital controls have an economic justification within the context of an economyâ  s and, in particular, its financial sectorâ  s stage of development. It concludes that capital controls can be justified...

Five years after the Global Financial Crisis, the economies of the United States (US) and the eurozone continue to struggle. How will Southeast Asian economies be affected should there be a further deterioration in conditions in the eurozone? In this paper, we present estimates using a Global...

Using an unbalanced panel dataset of bilateral exports from 1992 to 2009, this paper assesses the potential trade impacts of the expansion of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to ASEAN+3 and ASEAN+6 on the Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR). It finds that bilateral...

Despite a commonplace view that Asian regionalism lacks institutions, Asia, in fact, is full of regional institutions and frameworks in various forms. The rise and fall of regional institutions in Asia is an extremely dynamic process. Using a game theory approach, this paper hypothesizes that...

A common view holds that the trend toward Asian financial regionalism is a relatively new phenomenon that became significant after the Asian financial crisis of 1997/98. This paper challenges this view by exploring and analyzing financial regionalist projects in Asia throughout the 1990s. As...

This paper analyzes the patterns and determinants of financial integration in East Asia by using the data set of cross-border holdings of financial assets such as equity portfolio, long-term and short-term debt securities, and bank claims. Empirical analysis based on the gravity model of...

As East Asia becomes increasingly integrated through market-driven trade and FDI activities, free trade agreements (FTAs) are proliferating. Consolidation of multiple and overlapping FTAs into a single East Asian FTA can help mitigate the harmful noodle bowl effects of different or competing...

This paper examines whether increasing trade intensity among East Asian countries has led to a synchronization of business cycles. It extends the work of Shin and Wang (2004) in two ways: by (i) improving the specification of their business cycle correlation equation, and (ii) extending the...