This policy paper attempts to evaluate the viability of switching from the US dollar to the euro in international oil pricing. If materialised, the switch would not impact only OPEC nations but would also have ramifications for other oil exporting as well as importing nations. It would also have...

This research is an inter-temporal update of an empirical paper published by Essayyad et al., which is based on work of Loretan and Nardo et al. We continue to employ the same principal component technique, to construct an alternative US Dollar Index to gauge movements in currency markets. The...

The methodology of building up a dollar index capturing the appropriate weights of different currencies of trading partners has been challenged. This paper tries to suggest a methodological improvement. The authors employ multivariate statistical techniques to identify appropriate financial and...

This article investigates concentration, efficiency, and profitability of commercial banks operating in Saudi Arabia, which is considering acceding to the World Trade Organisation whose rules on financial services liberalisation could pose a competitive challenge to local banks. We use...