Infrastructure connectivity in Northeast Asia — comprising the northeastern People's Republic of China, Japan, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the Republic of Korea, Mongolia, and the Russian Far East — has been hindered by limited intergovernmental cooperation. The paper finds...

This paper reviews a number of initiatives taken by public and private institutions aimed at minimizing the impact of the on-going crisis of the financial sector on its ability to supply trade finance to support trade at affordable rates. In doing so, it draws a few policy lessons. One of them...

The paper empirically analyzes stock market integration and the benefit possibilities of international portfolio diversification across the Southeast Asia (ASEAN) and U.S. equity markets. It employs daily sample of 6 ASEAN equity market indices and S&P 500 index as a proxy of U.S. market index...

Measuring the impact of political risk on investment projects is one of the most vexing issues in international business. One popular approach is to assume that the sovereign yield spread captures political risk and to augment the project discount rate by this spread. We show that this approach...

Trade finance shortfalls now appear regularly. Does this matter for trade expansion and economic development in developing countries? Global trade finance has resumed following the 2009 global financial crisis. However, the pattern of recovery has been uneven across countries and categories of...

This paper aims at clarifying the concept of Islamic Financial System (IFS), as part of the whole Islamic economic system and its viability to be applied nowadays. The paper included exploring the nature, origin, distinctive criteria, unique features, goals of IFS and the means to achieve them,...

Jordanian Islamic Banks (JIBs) are faced by an enormous challenge that is the financial Globalization and liberalization, where the financial openness nationally and internationally took various deep dimensions and effects that affected economic and financial systems worldwide. This study aims...

We introduce the revised version of the KOF Globalisation Index, a composite index measuring globalization for every country in the world along the economic, social and political dimension. The original index was introduced by Dreher (2006) and updated in Dreher et al. (2008). This second...

Not long ago, financial markets in most poor and middle-income countries were shallow to nonexistent, and closed to foreigners. Governments often had to rely on risky borrowing abroad; the private sector had even fewer options. But between 1995 and 2005, domestic debt in the emerging markets grew...

The study aims to determine the available strategic alternatives for commercial banks in Jordan, in order to face the challenges of European-Jordanian Partnership Agreement and World Trade Organisation. This is based on analysing the external and internal variables that influence these banks and...