East Asia has rapidly become the third centre of gravity for global economic activity. North America is relatively well integrated with East Asia, but Europe is not. This paper explores the extent to which economic growth and trade policy developments over the next decade or so will strengthen...

The controversy over the appropriate partitioning of East Asian growth into accumulation versus technical change has overlooked a fundamental indeterminacy in measurement. As a result, we cannot rule out the possibility that East Asia has in fact experienced a tremendous amount of technological...

The World Bank's The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy makes official what East Asian specialists had long known: most of the high-performing Asian economies have had extensive government intervention, and some of these interventions, in the areas of credit and exports, have...

After the large exchange rate depreciations following the 1997 East Asian crisis, export volumes from East Asian countries responded with a notable lag. Two main explanations for this lag have been proposed: that contraction in domestic credit affected supply of exports; and that ‘competitive...

The paper argues that East Asian regionalism is fragile since (i) each nation's industrial competitiveness depends on the smooth functioning of 'Factory Asia' - in particular on intra-regional trade; (ii) the unilateral tariff-cutting that created 'Factory Asia' is not subject to WTO discipline...

The export booms in South Korea and Taiwan starting in the early 1960s are anomalous when compared with later export booms in other, non-East Asian countries such as Chile and Turkey. First, these booms have taken place in the context of comparatively small changes in relative prices in favour...

This paper explores to what extent the magnitude and speed of the contagion effects that materialized in East Asia in the second half of 1997 may have had "real" underpinnings, in the sense that the pattern of production, consumption and trade increased the vulnerability of East Asian countries...

This paper analyzes the macroeconomic consequences of the establishment of a monetary union in the presence of unionized labour markets. It is shown that the effects of the formation of a monetary union depend on several labour market features, such as the degree of centralization of wage...

We lay out a tractable model for fiscal and monetary policy analysis in a currency union, and analyse its implications for the optimal design of such policies. Monetary policy is conducted by a common central bank, which sets the interest rate for the union as a whole. Fiscal policy is...

This paper investigates the importance of fiscal policy in providing macroeconomic stabilisation in a monetary union. We use a microfounded New Keynesian model of a monetary union which incorporates persistence in inflation and non-Ricardian consumers, and derive optimal simple rules for fiscal...