This study reviews and evaluates a particular aspect of the institution building process in the transition countries of Southeast Europe. The focus is the development of the banking sector. It is argued that banking sector development plays an integral and pivotal role in the successful...

We study the impact of foreign banks' presence in Central and Eastern Europe's countries on their economic development and on the financial crisis they went through. We show that, despite a certain vulnerability of the domestic banking systems, the consequences of the opening of the banking...

This Selected Issues paper assesses the impact of Vietnam’s World Trade Organization (WTO) accession. It describes the main terms of Vietnam’s accession as regards trade in goods and services, and uses a partial equilibrium simulation model to estimate the likely impact of WTO...

The purpose of this paper is to examine factors influencing export in bilateral trade in the Middle-East context. The study considers the bilateral trade flows across three Gulf Cooperation Council countries - the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), Bahrain (BAH) and Qatar (QAT) - over the last 30...

This article contributes to the literature on stock market integration by developing and estimating a capital asset pricing model with segmentation effects in order to assess stock market segmentation and its effects on risk premia at the regional level. We show that the estimated degrees of...

Promising growth rates, increased trade, and competition among major global players for African resources have boosted the development and bargaining power of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in relation to the EU. However, Africa's least developed countries remain vulnerable to external shocks....

The main focus of this paper is the question if the success of regional integration organisation in developing countries is, in fact, dependent on factors like similarity of their economic structure, market size or lack of committment. It is shown that there are also other more important...

The paper explores regional trade integration of the countries involved in the EU eastward enlargement (EU-25) processes distinguishing the possible regional trade clusters within EU-25 that may support integration of the EU-15 and the new member states. We examine whether the gravity equation...