This study assesses the degree of financial integration in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU). The structure of the financial sector and its institutional arrangements indicate that financial integration is well advanced in some aspects. Common and foreign ownership of banks is...

We investigate the extent of regional financial integration in the member countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council. The limited volume data available suggests that regional integration is non-negligible. Bahrain and Kuwait investments especially are oriented towards the region. The development...

This Working Paper brings together three papers prepared as background for discussions at the Second High-Level Conference on Asian Integration cohosted by the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the IMF on May 25, 2006. The first documents recent trends in the intraregional flow of goods and...

This paper assesses changes in synchronization of real activity and financial market integration in Western Europe and evaluates their implications for financial stability. We find increased synchronization of real activity since the early 1980s and increased equity markets integration since the...

This paper investigates whether a regional bloc would enlarge or remain stagnant in size using a model where enlargement is the endogenous outcome of the interaction between the supply of and demand for membership. We show that a maximum size of the bloc exists beyond which the regional...

The countries of Eastern Europe achieved two remarkable transitions in the short period of the last two decades: from plan to market and, then, in the run-up to and entry into the European Union, they rode a wave of global trade and financial market integration. Focusing on the second...

We analyze how the pass-through from exchange rate to domestic wages depends on the degree of integration between domestic and foreign labor markets. Using data from 66 countries over the period 1981–2005, we find that the elasticity of domestic wages to real exchange rate is 0.1 after a year...

The Global Integrated Monetary and Fiscal model (GIMF) is a multi-region DSGE model developed by the Economic Modeling Division of the IMF for policy and scenario analysis. This paper compares two versions of GIMF, GIMF with a conventional financial accelerator, where bank balance sheets do not...

This paper uses the three-country duopoly model to examine the effects of lowered trade barriers when a new entrant joins a trading bloc. There are two firms—a small-country firm and a large-country firm within the bloc—and three markets—two within and one (new entrant’s) outside the...