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 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 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...

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...

This chapter suggests a rationale for a simple, scalable, and fast computational approach through the ‘Data With Direction Specification’ (DWDS) to supplement the implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). The specification provides a way for digitally executable...

This paper examines the impact of multinational trade accords on the degree of stock market linkage using NAFTA as a case study. Besides liberalizing trade among the U.S., Canada and Mexico, NAFTA has also sought to strengthen linkage among stock markets of these countries. If successful, this...