A central accompanying feature of financial market liberalization under fully convertible currency was unusual number of severe financial crisis. However, the recent episode of East Asian crisis is considered to be distinctive in several respects. First, it appears to be the first genuinely...

The debate over monetary standards and exchange rate regimes for developing countries is as wide open as ever. On the one hand, the big selling points of floating exchange rates-monetary independence and accommodation of terms of trade shocks-have not lived up to their promise. On the other...

What lessons can be drawn from the European experience with regional integration that started in the 1950s, for regional integration in Latin America, which is still in its early stages? We present here a new indicator of institutional integration and study how it developed vis-à-vis diverse...

This paper outlines a new methodology for the study of international policy coordination, which builds on two separate approaches previously used in the literature: optimal simple rules, and game-theoretic analysis. The new approach is illustrated by using the example of a changed target for the...

The fourteen Pacific island countries, under the auspices of their regional organization known as the Pacific Forum, launched two major initiatives in 2002 to introduce unhindered trade amongst themselves by 2010 and usher in an enlarged free trade area with Australia and New Zealand by 2015....

This paper assesses the prospects for monetary integration between Emerging East Asian (EEA) economies. We develop a simple analytical framework for currency unions of small open economies. The empirical analysis looks at a number of supply-side characteristics of EEA countries highlighted by...

This paper investigates the extent of capital mobility with respect to less developed countries over the study period 1979-2001. For this purpose, the Feldstein-Horioka equation linking domestic savings and investment is estimated. However, there is a novel empirical approach in this study based...

We report transparency scores and growth indicators for the euro area and various classes of potential euro area candidates. We then study currency union stabilization when monetary policy transparency may be imperfect and supply conditions may be country-specific. Sectoral productivity shocks...

This paper examines the circumstances under which it is beneficial for small countries in a currency union to peg their currency to a large one (euro zone for example). For these purposes, we provide a three-country theoretical model extending the two-country model by Ricci (2008). The...

This paper investigates empirically the economic feasibility of monetary integration in East Asia. A structural VAR model is employed to decompose real output, real exchange rate and price level into a lagged polynomial of supply, demand and monetary shocks. The shocks are identified through the...