It is usually recommended that countries diversify their economies to guard against any negative shocks that might impact on one industry. However, previous research has not identified how concentration can impact on the effectiveness of macroeconomic policies. This paper attempts to evaluate...

The Luenberger productivity indicator is employed to estimate and decompose productivity change in a sample of cooperative banks operating in 10 EU member states. An average annualised productivity growth of 2.59% is reported between 1996 and 2003, though there is heterogeneity in growth rates...

The main purpose of this paper is an examination of the pass-through interest rate transmission from the wholesale rates (central bank and/or money market rates) to the retail rates (deposit and lending rates) of the banking system. Knowledge of the transmission substantially helps us to...

This paper examines whether, in addition to standard unit root and cointegration tests, panel approaches also produce test statistics behaving erratically when applied to tests for Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). We show that if appropriate tests (which are robust to cross-sectional dependence)...

This article employs a unique data set from Trinidad and Tobago to examine the impact of their more complex family structures upon marital earnings premiums. While family structure includes the single married couple structure common in the US, families in Trinidad and Tobago often have more...

Does unrestricted control on the movement of capital increase capital mobility? Theoretically, the answer is yes. This paper uses the Feldstein-Horioka savings-investment methodology to examine the impact of financial openness on the degree of capital mobility in 104 countries. Our estimates...

Tourism is a key source of income for many small island economies, and so it is important to understand its determinants in such countries. We estimate a tourism demand model for the Maldives' five main source markets and find that, in addition to the usual foreign income and own price...

This article discusses two approaches to the identification and measurement of regional clusters and its networks in 'cross-sectoral' services which are not available through official industrial statistics. The first approach is a 'secondary-statistical' one consisting of a firm-based blending...

There has recently been an increasing interest in the establishment of a common currency area in East Asia in the aftermath of the East Asian financial crisis. In this article I examine the desirability and feasibility of forming a currency area in the region by checking the symmetry of shocks...