Pegging in a coordinated way to a regional basket currency is considered by many as optimal for east-Asian countries. By contrast, according to existing empirical studies, these countries have most often relied on noncooperative United States dollar or G3 pegs. We show for the first time...

Rapid population ageing and economic transformation in Asia raise the policy challenge of ensuring income security in old age. There is growing interest among policymakers in the potential role of noncontributory transfers as an instrument to address a variety of policy challenges, including old...

This paper examines the statistical nature of the persistency of current account balances and its determinants. With the assumption that stationary current account series ensures the long-run budget constraint while countries may experience “local non-stationarity†in current account...

In 2002, the Australian Bureau of Statistics became the first national statistical agency to produce a broad-focused measuring tool for assessing national progress, developing what was then known as Measuring Australia’s Progress. MAP was developed to help Australians assess whether life...

This paper sets up a canonical new Keynesian small open economy model with nominal price rigidities to explore the impact of habit persistence and exchange rate pass-through on the welfare ranking of alternative monetary policy rules. It identifies three factors that can affect the welfare...

The paper analyzes the financial crisis of through the lens of market failures and regulatory failures. We present a case that there were four primary failures contributing to the crisis : excessive risk-taking in the financial sector due to mispriced government guarantees; regulatory focus on...

This paper examines a new economic narrative for Australia to replace the emphasis on 'competitiveness' that sustained the wave of reform in the 1980s and 1990s. The need to ensure that Australians are endowed with the capabilities that will be relevant to success in this Asian century calls for...

This paper discusses the banking regulatory and supervisory practices in People’s Republic of China (PRC) with reference to the international standard for banking supervision, namely, the Basel Core Principles for Effective Banking Supervision (BCPs). While the PRC has incorporated...

We develop a new set of indexes of exchange rate stability, monetary policy independence, and financial market openness as the metrics for the trilemma hypothesis. In our exploration, we take a different and more nuanced approach than the previous indexes developed by Aizenman, Chinn, and Ito...

From the demographic perspective, the 21st century is the population ageing century. Population ageing is well underway in all Asian countries as a result of the spectacular falls in both fertility and mortality rates in the second half of the 20th century.