The spaghetti bowl phenomenon expected from the proliferating East Asian regional trade agreements (RTAs) is worrisome. In particular, the complicated web of hub-and-spoke type of overlapping free trade agreements (FTAs) can result in high costs for verifying rules of origin. As an alternative...

Using international data starting in 1957, we construct a sample of cases where fast-growing economies slow down. The evidence suggests that rapidly growing economies slow down significantly, in the sense that the growth rate downshifts by at least 2 percentage points, when their per capita...

Developing Asia has traditionally relied on exports to the United States and other industrialized countries for demand and growth. As a result, the collapse of exports to the United States and other industrialized countries during the 2008–09 global financial crisis has sharply curtailed GDP...

Countries in East Asia (EA) have made a great deal of progress in integrating their economies since the early 1990s. There has been a sustained increase in intra-regional trade in EA. On finance, however, regional financial integration has been lagging behind trade integration and EA has reached...

As trade integration deepens in East Asia, closer links among the business cycles of East Asian countries can be expected. Theoretically, however, increased trade could lead to either closer or looser business cycles across trading partners. This paper seeks to understand how the business cycles...

This study examines the effects of capital account restrictions on capital flows in nine emerging Asian economies using panel regressions with 75 economies and fixed effects over the period 1995–2007. The results show that effectiveness of capital controls in the nine emerging Asian economies...

This paper examines the unfolding of the U.S. sub-prime-generated turmoil and its potential spillover effects on Asia's emerging financial systems. The sub-prime mortgage mess has revealed key structural weaknesses in the evolution of modern credit markets. Although emerging Asian financial...

This paper analyzes the empirical relationships among demographic changes, saving, and current account balances in East Asia. The panel Vector-Auto Regressive (VAR) model shows that an increase in the dependency rate, especially the elderly dependency rate, significantly lowers saving rates and...

The purpose of this paper is to provide an assessment of the global economic impacts of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) as well as to provide a more comprehensive approach to estimating the global consequences of major disease outbreaks. Our empirical estimates of the economic effects...