The paper reviews the experience of regional economic cooperation in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Conceived as a regional security alliance, the GCC has evolved to become a common market in the making. All six GCC countries participate in the common market project, and additional...

This paper examines whether the renminbi (RMB) has supplanted the US dollar as the major anchor currency in the currency baskets of East Asian economies. It systematically demonstrates that existing techniques to address the problem of severe multicollinearity in estimations of the...

An Asian Currency Unit (ACU) index is constructed using an alternative procedure which minimizes a basket or portfolio of assets expressed in terms of national currencies. Using this estimated ACU Index and an ACU Deviation Indicator, the main finding of this study based on the current...

The authors develop a new set of indexes of exchange rate stability, monetary policy independence, and financial market openness as the metrics for the trilemma hypothesis. In their exploration, they take a different and more nuanced approach than the previous indexes developed by Aizenman,...

With the rise of the People's Republic of China (PRC) as the world's largest trading nation (measured by trade value) and second largest economic power (measured by GDP), its economic influence over the neighboring emerging economies in East Asia has also risen. The PRC introduced some exchange...

This paper presents a theoretical framework for policy making based on the “impossible trinity” or the “trilemma” hypothesis. A simple optimization model shows that placing more weight in terms of preference for each of the three open macroeconomic policies—exchange rate stability,...

This paper extends our previous paper (Aizenman, Chinn, and Ito 2008) and explores some of the unexplored questions. First, we examine the channels through which the trilemma policy configurations affect output volatility. Secondly, we investigate how trilemma policy configurations affect the...

Motivated by the unprecedented rise of swap agreements between the central banks of developed economies and their developing economy counterparts, this paper evaluates Asian swap arrangements and their association with the build-up of foreign reserves prior to the 2008–2009 global financial...

This paper emphasizes the importance of Europe’s structural problems and governance as the cause of the current euro area crisis. The euro may have led to bubbles, but member economies were not free of trouble before the euro. Many members were losing competitiveness and in need of removing...

Development economists have considered physical infrastructure to be a precondition for industrialization and economic development. Yet, two issues remain to be addressed in the literature. First, while proper identification of the causal effectiveness of infrastructure in reducing poverty is...