This paper has been written to make an enormous threat known to the public. We all know about the forest fires that raged in Indonesia and parts of Malaysia in 1997, and about the noxious haze covering the whole region, but only a few experts are aware of the threat of extinction of the last...

This paper begins with a short review and discussion of the literature on policy complementarities and its implications in terms of (sustainable) growth strategies and the possible emergence of a new policymaking paradigm. Thereafter, it analyses the effect on growth of complementarities in...

The strong recovery of the five crisis-affected countries of East Asia between 1999 and 2000 has revived the debate on the causes of the 1997 financial crisis. Initially there had been an emerging consensus that the crisis had originated from the capital account. However, some analysts see the...

This paper is a preliminary review of the state of competition in the insurance industry of selected Asian countries. In particular, it explores how competition has been affected by the market structure and the regulatory regime in the insurance industries of the ASEAN5 economies - Indonesia,...

It has been argued that credit-to-GDP gaps (credit gap) are useful early warning indicators for banking crises. In addition, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has also advocated using these gaps - estimated using a one-sided Hodrick-Prescott filter with a smoothing parameter of 400,000...