The accession of ten new countries to the European Union on 1 May 2004 represents a further milestone on the way to the economic and political integration of all countries in Europe. With their entry into the EU the new member states from Central and Eastern Europe have officially concluded...

Turkeyu0092s fulfilment of the EUu0092s first set of political criteria qualifies the country to start negotiations. But EU membership is much more demanding than most of Turkeyu0092s political and business elite realise. They hope that they can bargain away many of the onerous requirements for...

This report presents the findings of the 2011 Regional Level Evaluation of the Commission of the European Union’s co-operation with the Caribbean Region. The evaluation was carried out to provide meaningful feedback to the Commission and the European External Action Service (EEAS), but also to...

This review of regional integration in African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries takes a broad view of regional integration and includes various aspects of regional trade integration such as tariff reduction and covers behind the border dimensions of regional trade integration such as...

A central puzzle in international finance is that real exchange rates are volatile and, in stark contradiction to effcient risk-sharing, negatively correlated with cross-country consumption ratios. This paper shows that incomplete asset markets and a low price elasticity of tradables can account...

In this note we demonstrate that in affine models for bilateral exchange rates, the nature of return interdependence during crises depends on the tail properties of the fundamentals' distributions. We denote crisis linkages as either strong or weak, in the sense that the dependence remains or...

Within a two-step GARCH framework we explore the linkages between equity returns of ten sectors in the euro area, the United States and Japan, respectively. Our estimation framework allows a distinction to be made between spillover effects originating from one of the three currency areas and...

Over the past decades, cross-border financial flows have increased in importance and have in many occasions exceeded the underlying current account positions. This phenomenon has been accompanied by an increase in the volume of international equity transactions that accentuate the role of...

Four years after the introduction of the euro, this paper provides an overview of the current structure and integration of the euro area financial systems and related policy initiatives. We first compare the euro area financial structure with that of the United States and Japan. Using new and...