The 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis revealed the latent risks present in an increasingly integrated global economy and how virulent these risks can be when roused from dormancy. Given the inevitability of integration, the challenge is how to maximize its benefits while minimizing its costs. One...

A common view holds that the trend toward Asian financial regionalism is a relatively new phenomenon that became significant after the Asian financial crisis of 1997/98. This paper challenges this view by exploring and analyzing financial regionalist projects in Asia throughout the 1990s. As...

In November 2002, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) committed itself to the creation of an ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), in which goods, services, capital, and skilled labor would flow freely by the year 2020, or possibly even 2015. Hence, the AEC will guide the ASEAN...

Theories of regional integration typically analyze the regional integration process from the perspective of a single discipline, usually economics. However, such one-dimensional analytical frameworks cannot fully capture the richness and complexity of the inherently multi-dimensional regional...

Since 2006, the World Bank has been ranking almost 200 countries in terms of their ease of doing business (EoDB) to underscore the importance of a thriving private sector in promoting high and inclusive growth. Comparing these metrics for business friendliness among economic partners is more...