The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) is the least integrated economy in the Asia-Pacific region, whose intraregional trade was only 5.6 per cent in 2006. In order to estimate potential trade of the SAARC Member Countries (SMCs), we have estimated “behind the border”...

In spite of political skirmishes between two major members of SAARC, economic cooperation among the member states has been under way since the conclusion of the South Asian Preferential Trading Arrangement on 2-4 May 1995 at the 8th SAARC Summit in Delhi. So far, SAARC member countries have...

The seven-nation Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multisectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC), comprising Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand is emerging as one of the major subregional groups in Asia. Japan is the second largest trading partner for...

As revealed by the trade intensity indices, India and the People’s Republic of China have significant bilateral trade potential, which remains unexplored until now. These countries are presently negotiating for free trade arrangements among them based on their complementarities. This paper...

With the rise of India and other Southern engines of growth, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) and similar vehicles for South–South regional cooperation have gained in importance. Developing a stochastic frontier gravity model, this article investigates the...

In recent decades the Indian subcontinent has displayed remarkable invariance in the incidence of working poverty despite strong economic performance. It is widely held that education can rescue households from various types of poverty traps created by information problems and incorrect...

Several developing economies witnessed a large number of systemic financial and currency crises since the 1980s which resulted in severe economic, social, and political problems. The devastating impact of the 1982 and 1994-95 Mexican crises, the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, the 1998 Russian...

This paper proposes a macro-prudential financial soundness analysis that can be used by most developing and transformation countries with or without crisis experience as well as by developed countries with limited data. The objective is to detect economic and financial sector vulnerability,...