The European Union (EU) has a splendid record concerning enlargement. Judging by the increasing number of EU member countries, enlargement has been the most successful EU policy ever. The economic side of its eastern enlargement is, however, a hybrid bag of effects for the EU’s eastern...

Whether international economic integration arrangements result in a more liberal trade at the multilateral level cannot be proven with ease. Integration may start this process, but it may also reverse it. New mega-integration deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Regional Comprehensive...

Using a matched sample design where companies are matched by size and industry from Australian, Canadian and US capital markets, we investigate whether capital market integration varies across industries and by geographical proximity. The tests are conducted in the multi-factor pricing framework...

Using Chinese provincial data, we examine the relationship between relative prices and wages, which can be derived on the basis of the Balassa-Samuelson theorem. First, considering cross sectional dependency in our data, we implement recently developed panel unit root tests. We report strong...

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....

The paper tests the hypothesis of a maturity-independent foreign exchange risk premium or equivalently of a constant elasticity of substitution of international assets across the maturity spectrum. The empirical findings indicate that elasticity of substitution is indeed a function of maturity....

This paper uses a simple open economy interest rate determination model to empirically examine an important aspect of pre-crisis monetary and exchange rate policy. It investigates whether sterilization of the reserve effects of capital inflows helped keep interest rates sufficiently high that...

In this paper the Balassa steps of economic integration are first reviewed, and then extended to cover currernt integration configurations. Pre-conditions for each stage of integration are detailed using a backward-looking economic conditionality approach, and then both economic and political...

In this paper we attempt to examine the issue of sustainability of current account imbalances in eight East Asia countries using the latest developments in nonstationary panel data analysis. The methods of nonstationary time series panels provide a much more promising explanation than would an...

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...