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 examines an important aspect of the ongoing hybridization of contemporary international monetary law. The formerly clear-cut body of international law on capital and exchange controls, once exclusively enshrined in the Articles of Agreement of the International Monetary Fund, has been...

The paper discusses the role of regional public goods vs. global goods in influencing postcommunist transition in Central and Eastern Europe and former USSR with special attention given to three particular factors: (i) external anchoring of national reform process; (ii) international trade...

This volume was prepared by Inga Heiland while she was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in July 2016 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It comprises five chapters addressing one or more aspects of international trade and...

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 examines capital controls in two ways. First, it assesses whether capital controls have an economic justification within the context of an economyâ  s and, in particular, its financial sectorâ  s stage of development. It concludes that capital controls can be justified...

The Americas have been a key driver of regional trade agreements (RTAs) since the 1990s. This study considers the effect of these agreements on trade liberalization, and the lessons that this offers for other parts of the world, notably Asia. It finds broad geographical coverage of RTAs in the...

Africa is one of the most economic-integrated continents by a number of regional trade agreements in the continent. There are about 30 bilateral and multilateral trade agreements within the continents so that each African country is a member of at least one regional trade agreement. Trade...

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...

It is widely believed that trade agreements are necessary to enable the UK to prosper in world markets. In reality, unilateral free trade is possible and offers many benefits. The UK’s exports of services to the EU owe little to the Single Market as national barriers to trade in services still...