The Netherlands has strongly benefited from globalisation, which boosted international trade, cross-border investment and economic growth over the latest decades. Looking ahead, the Netherlands needs to shift the trade and investment orientation from traditional slow-growing markets to faster...

This paper first provides a brief overview of the literature on market segmentation and then presents an empirical exercise that sheds more light on the significance of border effects across European countries. The literature suggests that integration in the EU goods and financial markets is...

Although there is no single yardstick to gauge the degree of integration, there is ample evidence that financial markets in the euro area have some way to go before national demarcation lines will effectively disappear and financial market integration is satisfactory. While there has been a push...

The Austrian economy has benefited substantially from the expansion of economic ties with Central and Eastern Europe, which has provided a significant boost to growth, productivity, competitiveness, profits and (more controversially) aggregate employment. Indeed, among the older EU member...

This paper looks at the empirical determinates of foreign currency reserve holdings across a panel of around 130 countries between 1980 and 2008. The paper builds on the existing literature by adopting a panel error-correction model specification and by extending the sample to include the recent...

This paper examines whether the composition of a country’s external liabilities and assets has an incidence on its risk of suffering financial turmoil. Particular emphasis is put on the role of international financial integration, using newly-constructed measures of contagion shocks. These new...

Some euro area countries accumulated large and persistent external imbalances during the upswing, revealing important weaknesses in the macroeconomic management of the monetary union. Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain ran large current account deficits by historical standards, while Finland,...

This paper describes the dynamics of the external positions of euro area countries since the formation of EMU. While external imbalances have been the main focus in recent times, current account balances can only be properly interpreted in the context of understanding the overall international...