This study improves the African Regional Integration Index (ARII) proposed by the African Union, the African Development Bank and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa by providing a theoretical framework and addressing shortcomings related to weighting and aggregation of the...

Recent research has found evidence of increasing comovement in CPI inflation rates across industrialised countries. This paper considers whether this can be attributed to greater global integration of product markets. To examine this question, we build a data set of 28 matched product category...

In this research project, we attempt to examine the behavior of business cycles in Asia in order to deepen our understanding of and expand research on this topic. Given the importance of the People’s Republic of China, Japan, and the United States in the region economy, we use these three...

Future markets are the result of trying to eliminate or reduce risk, i.e. an attempt to avoid instability of prices in international business. Since trading on future markets reduces the risk of business, it significantly increases the scope of trade and number of stakeholders, which logically...

Recent research has found evidence of increasing comovement in CPI inflation rates across industrialised countries. This paper considers whether this can be attributed to greater global integration of product markets. To examine this question, we build a data set of 28 matched product category...

This paper discusses how international integration affects the need and scope for welfare state activities. The first part reviews the main mechanisms, which have been considered in the literature, namely, tax base mobility, risk and race to the bottom effects in welfare policies. The second...

Substantial evidence suggests that countries with stronger trade linkages have more synchro- nized business cycles. The standard international business cycle framework cannot replicate this finding, uncovering the trade-comovement puzzle. In this paper we investigate the extent to which more...

This lecture addresses three related aspects of monetary and fiscal management in Europe and elsewhere. First, I discuss the implications of economic integration for monetary and fiscal policy, especially the narrow focus on low inflation as the main objective of monetary policy. I argue that...

This paper studies the effects of more than 40 years of European integration on prices. Up to now, most empirical research in this area has been micro-based. We follow a macro approach. On the basis of scaled HICP strong evidence is found for price convergence in Europe, especially in the 1960s...

In an earlier study of ours, we provided evidence of consumer price level convergence in Europe, particularly in the 1960s and the 1990s (Faber and Stokman, 2004). The analysis was based on transformations of country HICP indices into absolute price levels, by combining time series HICP data...