A major side effect of globalization is the erosion of the tax base due to the growing mobility of capital and the consequent international tax competition for capital. The potential loss of revenues is encouraging developing Asia's governments to look for alternative, nonconventional, nontax...

Due to population aging, weakening of family-based support, and other factors, old-age income support is becoming an issue of growing importance throughout Asia. This is especially true in East Asia and Southeast Asia where the demographic transition is already well under way. This paper...

Rebalancing growth toward domestic demand has emerged as a key postcrisis challenge for sustaining developing Asia's rapid growth in the medium and long term. The central objective of this paper is to explore the role of fiscal policy in the region's rebalancing process. What matters most for...

The paper empirically investigates the relationship between productivity and employment in Republic of Korea using structural vector autoregression (VAR) models. Productivity-enhancing technology shocks significantly increase hours worked, which lends support to the real business cycle theory....

This paper empirically examines the relative importance of different sources of inflation in developing Asia. In particular, it tests the widely held view that the region's current inflation surge is primarily the result of external price shocks such as oil and food shocks. In addition, this...

Overlapping free trade agreements (FTAs) have given rise to hub-and-spoke FTAs that may promote trade by giving an export advantage to the FTA hub country. We empirically investigate the effect of hub-and-spoke FTAs on trade using panel data consisting of 99 countries and covering the period...

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the People's Republic of China are economic partners as well as economic competitors. The ASEAN- People's Republic of China Free Trade Area (ACFTA), which is set to come into effect around 2010, is designed to boost trade between the two...

Global current account imbalances are one of the key macroeconomic imbalances that underlie the global financial crisis. The central objective of this paper is to analyze the causes and consequences of global imbalances from the perspective of developing Asia. More specifically, we examine the...

An integral part of global current account imbalances is the large and persistent current account surplus developing Asia has run since the 1997-1998 Asian crisis. A country's current account surplus is, by definition, equal to its net saving. The central objective of this paper is to...