This paper examines the relevance of financial market characteristics for explaining the catching-up process in Europe and Asia. Global financial integration has been associated with divergent patterns of real convergence and the current account in emerging markets. While countries in emerging...

This study assesses the speed of real convergence in ECOWAS using the Optimal Currency Area (OCA) theory to determine the readiness of member countries for a monetary union. The study leveraged on Bayoumi and Eichengreen (1996) and computed OCA indices utilizing both variables suggested by the...

The African Union advocates the creation of a monetary union in stages for the entire continent starting with each of the different sub-regions. Building from that, the Southern African Development Community has, among its goals, the creation of a monetary union for its member states. However,...

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed the European Monetary Union (EMU) in front of a new economic reality. All the health restrictions enforced at the EU level had repercussions on the real convergence of the Eurozone. In the present article, we aimed to observe how real convergence in the Euro area...

One of the fundamental pillars of the European Union aims at the convergence of economic performances among its Member States. This objective has become increasingly challenging with the advancement of the integration process from the customs union to the economic and monetary union, from the...

This paper addresses the question of macroeconomic integration in the Asian Pacific region. Economically, the analysis is based on the notions of stochastic long-run convergence and business cycle coherence. The econometric procedure consists of tests for cointegration, the examination of vector...

The subject of this paper tackles questions of macroeconomic integration of the South-East Asian countries South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. Economically, the analysis is based on notions of stochastic long-run convergence and business cycle synchrony in the GDPs. According tests for...

This study analyses the impact of economic catching-up on annual inflation rates in the European Union with a special focus on the new member countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Using an array of estimation methods, we show that the Balassa-Samuelson effect is not an important driver of...

Many of the EU accession countries have announced that they will not only try to enter the EU as quickly as possible but also to adopt the euro at an early date. This is justified by the effort to avoid the danger of financial instability in the period prior to euro-introduction. However, by...

Financial globalisation has been associated with divergent current account patterns in emerging market economies. While countries in emerging Asia have been running sizeable current account surpluses, countries in emerging Europe have been facing large current account deficits. In this paper we...