The middle-income trap is a serious problem in developing Asia and Pacific economies. Middle-income trap is the situation in which a country's growth slows after reaching middle-income levels and the transition to high-income levels becomes unattainable. International remittances of immigrants...

Asia remained the largest market for energy sources in 2018. The Russian Federation has a clear vision to develop its Asian energy projects in order to provide a greater share of Asian energy imports. This paper models Russian Federation-Asia and the Pacific energy trade patterns via the gravity...

The high hopes that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) would open up trade across the Pacific were dashed by the decision of the new US Government under President Trump to withdraw from the agreement in January 2017. Despite being controversial, the TPP had been recognized as an agreement that...

Mean obesity level of the 2 - 8-year-old children in the region was 14.4%, 14.1% were overweight, 2.7% were underweight, 1.4% were stunted, and 6.8% were stunted at birth. Acanthosis nigricans prevalence was 5%, an indicator of pre-diabetes. Sixty-one percent of the children were Native Hawaiian...

We assess the evolution of spillover effects of unconventional monetary policies (UMPs) on Asia and the Pacific region, and evaluate the impact on and implications for the macroeconomy. We develop a Panel Vector Auto Regression model for Asia and the Pacific region for a period covering data...

Asia and the Pacific is the world's fastest growing regional economy, a position it has held for over a decade. A major challenge for sustained regional growth and development and ensuring greater engagement between national economies is increased investment in economic and social...

Digital trade facilitation refers to the application of modern information and communication technologies (ICTs) to simplify and automate international trade procedures. It is rapidly becoming essential to maintaining trade competitiveness and enabling effective participation in cross-border...

Digital trade is upending the way consumers and companies do business. Digital trade and e-commerce have become major drivers of economic development by enhancing productivity and lowering costs of trade in goods. But government policies have been slow to catch up with the increasing importance...

This paper proposes a new method to predict the impact of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) on trade and welfare taking the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement as a case study. Relying on a novel dataset of treaty texts covering all trade agreements notified to the WTO, we first...

The 14 Pacific developing member countries (DMCs) of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) have opted for very different exchange rate regimes with varying degrees of flexibility. Whereas several microstates have adopted an external currency as their legal tender, others have decided to use a basket...