International pressure to revalue China’s currency stems in part from the expectation that rapid economic growth should be associated with a real exchange rate appreciation. This hinges on the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis under which economic growth is due to relative tradable productivity...

Some of the findings from new trade and economic geography theory are quite critical concerning the South-South agreements. This study contributes to the discussion by means of different empirical analyses of a representative set of South-South integrations. The income developments of its member...

In this paper, we assess whether trade among member countries of a regional trade agreement (intra-regional trade) contributes more to output growth than trade with nonmember countries (extra-regional trade). We use Granger causality tests to evaluate the trade-growth relationship in 13...

The paper has three purposes. First, it explains how the impact of liberalization of service sectors on output growth differs from that of liberalization of trade in goods. Second, it suggests a policy-based rather than outcome-based measure of the openness of a country’s services regime. Such...

This paper empirically addresses the question of the prospects of integration among African states in light of Mundell’s theory of optimum currency areas. The symmetry and asymmetry of shocks affecting African countries is measured by a structural vector autoregression decomposition method...

Regional trade arrangements are becoming an increasingly popular vehicle for the promotion of trade and growth. In East Africa the previously defunct East Africa Customs Union has been resurrected to improve trade between Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. To facilitate the development of the East...

The West Bank and Gaza have been occupied by Israel since 1967. As a result, it experienced a deep integration of its factor and goods markets with the richer economy of Israel. However, such an integration did not bring significant “dynamic” gains. Time series analysis indeed suggest that...

This study identifies income convergence in Europe over 1960 to 2012. The Great Recession since 2008 reversed the GDP per capita convergence in the EU-15, but the extransition countries have mostly continued to catch up. We found this by analysing the Sigma convergence of GDP per capita in the...

Most empirical applications of the OCA approach based on asymmetric shocks have failed to account for the credibility aspects that play an important role in deciding to join the EMU from the EMS or the EMS-BIS. In this paper, we tackle this problem by relying on a regime switching approach that...

The model developed in this paper expands upon the traditional neoclassical exogenous growth model by facilitating a long-run growth analysis of the impact of openness to trade within a multi-country framework. Openness affects growth by impacting the extent of knowledge spillovers from abroad....