The sizable hoarding of international reserves by several East Asian countries has been frequently attributed to a modern version of monetary mercantilism - hoarding international reserves in order to improve competitiveness. From a long-run perspective, manufacturing exporters in East Asia...

The paper investigates the impact of exchange rate volatility on growth in Emerging Europe and East Asia. Exchange stability has been argued to affect growth negatively as it deprives countries from the ability to react in a flexible way to asymmetric real shocks and may enhance the probability...

Motivated by the observed international reserve hoarding behavior in the post-1997 crisis period, we explore the Mrs Machlup's wardrobe hypothesis and the related keeping up with the Joneses argument. It is conceived that, in addition to psychological reasons, holding a relatively high level of...

The global economic crisis has revealed that growth in East Asia is highly vulnerable to slowdown in exports to major advanced economies. This paper shows that in precrisis years, at least one third of growth in the People's Republic of China was due to exports, and this proportion was even...

This paper compares the experience of growth performance and macroeconomic adjustment between East Asia and Latin America from 1970 to 2000. We find that the difference in growth performance between the two regions can be largely attributed to the differences in fundamental growth factors such...

Many economists believe that the nature of exchange rate management was an important reason for rapid economic growth in East Asia. In this view, Asian countries avoided extreme exchange rate appreciations and kept their nominal exchange rates close to market clearing levels. In contrast, the...

There is surprisingly little macroeconomic empirical research which would support a presumed link between education and development. I identify three major reasons why it remains difficult to estimate the economic relevance of education as a determinant of growth and development. First, most...