This paper reviews trends in East Asian regionalism in the areas of trade and investment, money and finance, and infrastructure. It presents various measures of trade and financial integration. An important finding of the paper is that increasing trade and financial integration in the region is...

This paper considers the extent to which the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) meets the criteria for a common currency area. NAFTA is compared with the EC, a regional grouping for which initial plans for a monetary union are already in place. Most of the anticipated benefits from a...

Except perhaps for the lead countries of global finance that may maintain a useful degree of monetary independence from each other, joining a regional monetary union boosts financial development. It enhances liquidity and depth of financial markets through the provision of sound money used over...

Lack of A Legal Framework:Now that we have the technology and trade agreements to facilitate border-free trades, why not using them. So far, the only major obstacle to the advent of smart contracts is a lack of a legal framework. It is no surprise that the legal structures to regulate the manner...

ASEAN has been deepening intra-regional integration at the same time that it has been forming various cooperative arrangements with its partners, and its Member Countries have been pursuing individual trade accords. Which would be the optimal configuration for ASEAN? In this paper, we evaluate...

Bilateral and regional cooperation initiatives in Asia have been growing in importance over the last five years.These accords span the real and financial sectors; rather than following the more typical pattern of "trade first,money later", recent policy initiatives involve the simultaneous...

This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the impact of NAFTA on growth and business cycles in Mexico. The effect of the agreement in spurring a dramatic increase in trade and financial flows between Mexico and its NAFTA partners, and its impact on Mexican economic growth and business...

Free trade improves the well-being of all parties to it. The most significant way that trade achieves this outcome is by enabling and incentivising specialisation in production, and also encouraging mechanisation and innovation. As specialisation deepens, and as mechanisation and innovation...

This paper examines the impact of the Southern African Development Community free trade agreement on the stock returns on South Africa Stock returns. The free trade area was officially implemented on August 18th 2008. The available literature shows that free trade areas create positive returns...

This paper empirically tests the hypothesis that trade can act as an engine of growth using panel data for the Southern African Development Community (SADC), a regional integration agreement (RIA) organization, the central objective of whose formation was the need to accelerate, foster, and...