This paper reviews the East Asian experience with financial integration, how economies in the region have responded to shocks, and what they may do to continue to thrive in the future. It discusses openness to capital flows as a key aspect of financial integration, briefly considering the...

Regionalism is taking two forms. It is occurring firstly through free trade arrangements and secondly through monetary arrangements. In this paper, we highlight the issues related to the reversal of sequence between trade integration (free trade agreement) and monetary integration (a monetary...

We use a two-country model with a central bank maximizing union-wide welfare and two fiscal authorities minimizing comparable, but slightly different country-wide losses. We analyze the rivalry between the three authorities in seven static games. Comparing a homogeneous with a heterogeneous...

International comparisons show that countries with co-ordinated wage setting generally have lower unemployment than countries with less co-ordinated wage setting. This paper argues that the monetary regime may affect whether co-ordination among many wage setters is feasible. A strict monetary...

The combination of discretionary monetary policy, labor-market distortions and nominal wage rigidity yields an inflation bias as monetary policy tries to exploit nominal wage contracts to address labour-market distortions Although an inflation target eliminates this inflation bias, it creates a...

Does a monetary union need fiscal shock absorbers helping the participating countries to cope with asymmetric shocks? The consensus in the debate over EMU argues that the answer is yes. In this paper, we revisit the issue, building on a dynamic, general equilibrium framework of regions in a...

The implications of monetary unification for fiscal policies are discussed. The roles of nominal exchange rate flexibility in the presence of asymmetric national shocks and nominal price rigidities as an automatic stabilizer and source of disturbances to real economic performance are reviewed....