This paper reviews trends in East Asian regionalism in the areas of trade and investment, money and finance, and infrastructure. It presents various measures of trade and financial integration. An important finding of the paper is that increasing trade and financial integration in the region is...

A mixture of political and economic reasons in support of what eventually came to be known as European Union (EU) were also evident in its recent expansion. Under the politico-military umbrella of NATO , the principles of capitalism were strengthened in Europe, and by extension the interests of...

How much can regional monitoring of financial markets and coordination of financial sector policies contribute to preventing and mitigating financial crises? This paper reviews and compares the experiences of Europe and Asia, which have taken different routes and have achieved different levels...

With the accession of 10 new European Union member states in May 2004, much attention is being placed on the governance of European Community institutions. This article focuses specifically on discussions of European Central Bank (ECB) governance, particularly as regards the ECB?s amendment of...

Recent research suggests that adopting a common currency increases bilateral trade. In this paper, I explore experiences of currency union entry in the post-war period and find no effect on trade. Previous results derived from a large panel data set (covering more than 200 countries from 1948...

We present a new approach to study empirically the effect of the introduction of the euro on currency invoicing. Our approach uses a compositional multinomial logit model, in which currency choice depends on the characteristics of both the currency and the country. We use unique quarterly panel...

The demise of the CMEA trading system in 1991 and the shift to convertible currency settlements and world market prices was expected to bring about a severe contraction of intra-group trade, coupled with large imbalances in trade between Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The observed...

According to the Maastricht Treaty, EMS countries will be able to join EMU if their inflation rates are not more than 1.5% higher than the average of the three lowest inflation rates in the EMS. In this paper I analyse the likelihood of inflation rates converging to the levels set out in the...

This paper analyzes competing interpretations for the large increases in the hoarding of international reserves by developing countries. While the first phase of the rapid hoarding of reserves in the aftermath of the East Asian crisis has been dominated by self insurance against exposure to...