This paper examines the political and security challenges and prospects of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in the coming two decades. To simplify what is a hugely complex and wide-ranging set of issues, I divide the security challenges facing ASEAN into six broad categories....

Income distributions for developing countries in Asia are modeled using beta-2 distributions, which are estimated by a method of moments procedure applied to grouped data. Estimated parameters of these distributions are used to calculate measures of inequality, poverty, and pro-poor growth in...

In this paper we develop an analytical framework using the household utility maximization approach to model stability conditions to avoid household debt overhang. Our theoretical framework suggests that household debt stability is a function of five factors, namely the rate of interest, period...

This study examines economic activity measured with firm performance indicators using the changes in intensity of night-time light in four CAREC economies: Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia. The empirical analysis is based on the World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) data for 2019 and...

More than at any time in the history, climate change is having an increasingly unprecedented effect on human lives. Economies are affected severely in terms of sovereign risk due to climate change variations influencing the macroeconomy. Asian countries are highly susceptible to economic...

The aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2007 - 2009 has called the export-led growth model of Asian economies into question. This paper describes the contribution that macroeconomic policy can make to promote a rebalancing of growth away from dependence on exports to developed economies...

Pegging in a coordinated way to a regional basket currency is considered by many as optimal for east-Asian countries. By contrast, according to existing empirical studies, these countries have most often relied on noncooperative United States dollar or G3 pegs. We show for the first time that by...

This paper extends our previous paper (Aizenman, Chinn, and Ito 2008) and explores some of the unexplored questions. First, we examine the channels through which the trilemma policy configurations affect output volatility. Secondly, we investigate how trilemma policy configurations affect the...

This paper estimated the pass-through effects of yuan’s exchange rates on prices of the US and Japanese imports from the People's Republic of China (PRC). Empirical results show that, a 1% nominal appreciation of the yuan would result in a 0.23% increase in prices of the US imports in the...

This paper revisits the issue of exchange rate regimes in emerging Asia. It is divided into two main parts. The first part compares de jure and de facto exchange rate regimes in Asia over the decade 1999-2009. It finds that while Asia is home to a wide array of exchange rate regimes, there are...