Uncertainty is a crucial issue for producers who must make input decisions without knowing prices and without perfect knowledge of realized output. In this context, price expectations strongly determine the production choices and market prices that result from market-clearing conditions. This...

The Asian style of regional integration may be seen as a “quasi-common economy” that eschews a formal linkup in political or monetary terms, but manages to generate similar results by strong physical integration and distributed chains of production and service delivery. This note proposes...

Recent debates on a sustainable recovery of the global economy have tended to overemphasise the "savings glut" hypothesis and the unavoidable imperative of higher consumption in China and other emerging Asian countries. That oversaving and not underinvestment is coming in the way of a quicker...

This paper analyzes systematic risk of sovereign bonds in four East Asian countries: China, Malaysia, Philippines, and Thailand. A bivariate stochastic volatility model that allows for time-varying correlation is estimated with Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulation. The volatilities and...

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of the Program for Pollution Control Evaluation and Rating (PROPER) in Indonesia. PROPER, the first major public disclosure program in the developing world, was launched in June 1995; though it collapsed in 1998 with the Asian financial crisis, it is currently...

Pakistan’s pension system is in the process of increasing funding in anticipation of providing for a growing elderly population. Regulations require that these pension assets be invested domestically. In this paper, we quantify how diversification of the pension funds to include world...

Pakistan’s pension system is in the process of increasing funding in anticipation of providing for a growing elderly population. The pension assets are mainly invested domestically, as it was just in January 2007 that regulations changed to allow the purchase of international assets. In this...