This article examines whether international trade openness is related with inflation or not in Asian countries. The relationship in the world has been discussed including economic growth for a long time from both theoretical and empirical ones, however, there has not been any consensus about...

The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) was established in 1989. APEC member countries are remarkably different from each other in many respects. The traditional optimum currency area (OCA) theory may not be suitable for application to APEC. This paper stresses business cycles and trade...

Large accumulations of foreign reserves have been ongoing recently in Asian countries. Policymakers seem to have decided to increase high levels of foreign reserves for self-insurance or precautionary purposes against exchange rate movements. Other countries have accumulated foreign reserves to...

This article examines the suitability of the currency union in the Central Franc Zone (CFA) relative to business cycles and trade. Optimum currency area (OCA) criteria have been employed to determine the suitability of currency integration. This paper also develops a procedure for application of...

This article focuses on the empirical relationship between the United States’ and Japan’s yield spread of interest rates and economic growth in Japan. The yield spread is defined in this article as the difference between the Japanese government bond yield minus the US government bond yield....

Since the 1980s, many regional agreements have appeared to facilitate trade and spur economic growth. This paper examines whether or not the purchasing power parity (PPP) hypothesis for regional agreements has been satisfied. This study employs a nonlinear unit root test for real exchange rates...

Because the European Central Bank's current goal is to achieve stable prices, some EU countries have adopted direct inflation control as a target of financial policy. Several other countries, however, have adopted other targets, such as money supply targeting, exchange rate targeting, and other...

Purpose – This paper, using daily data, sets out to present an empirical analysis of the relationship between recent Japanese stock prices and macroeconomic variables under the quantitative easing policy in Japan. Design/methodology/approach – The theoretical framework of the analysis is...

This paper estimates the effect that the APEC 'currency union', loosely defined, has on trade and, via trade, on output per capita. A gravity model is used to measure the impact of exchange-rate variability on trade flows within APEC. The gain in trade flows from eliminating nominal...