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...

Sweden became a member of the European Union (EU) in 1995. Since then, she has been integrated into the EU's internal market under the Single Market Programme (SMP). Before Sweden's accession to the EU, she was a member of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) signed with the EU in 1972....

The Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralisation (CMIM) and the ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO), established in March 2010 and May 2011, respectively, have made substantial headway. But despite the rapid progress, a series of fundamental questions have been raised, particularly about...

The financial crisis in Europe has resulted in a new assessment of monetary and financial integration both in Europe and in Asia. Before the current crisis, regional integration in monetary and fiscal affairs including mechanisms to stabilize exchange rates enjoyed a lot of academic and...

Purpose - A major lesson of the EMU crisis is that serious disequilibria result from regional monetary arrangements not designed to be robust to a variety of shocks. The purpose of this paper is to assess these disequilibria within the CEMAC, UEMOA and CFA zones. Design/methodology/approach - In...

After joining the EU in 1995, uncertainties over the future legal and administrative system remained latent. But there was also rising awareness of Austria's possibilities to influence the decision making processes in Brussels. The Austrian system of social partnership, based on centralized wage...

The paper reviews the experience of regional economic cooperation in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Conceived as a regional security alliance, the GCC has evolved to become a common market in the making. All six GCC countries participate in the common market project, and additional...

The Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralisation (CMIM) and the ASEAN 3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO), established in March 2010 and May 2011, respectively, have made substantial headway. But despite the rapid progress, a series of fundamental questions have been raised, particularly about...

Purpose - This paper makes an analysis of trade in the WAMZ as well as the WAMZ's trade with other countries in West Africa, Europe and Asia based on the Optimal Currency Area (OCA) theory. This theory first proposed by Mundell (1961) as a basis for evaluating whether or not an area constitutes...

This study explores the analysis of convergence process of EU countries. The analysis shall proceed through three steps. Firstly, we shall describe our position within the theoretical discourse about convergence theory. Then we shall move on to compare the indicators of monetary and fiscal...