This Working Paper brings together three papers prepared as background for discussions at the Second High-Level Conference on Asian Integration cohosted by the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the IMF on May 25, 2006. The first documents recent trends in the intraregional flow of goods and...

We analyze the impact of the elimination of textile and clothing (T&C) quotas in 2005 on India. Our simulations suggest that while Indian exports of T&C will continue to expand in the presence of the safeguards on China, they will be affected adversely once these safeguards are lifted. We argue...

The quality of institutions-meaning the quality of contract enforcement, property rights, shareholder protection, and the like-has received a great deal of attention in recent years. The purposes of this paper are twofold. First, it studies the consequences of trade when institutional...

Anglophone African countries have been implementing reform and modernization initiatives in their Customs administrations. This paper outlines the progression of key reform and modernization initiatives in these countries since the early 1990s, and assesses the gap between these reforms and...

Over the past decade, China’s growth model has become more reliant on investment and its footprint in global imports has widened substantially. Several economies within China’s supply chain are increasingly exposed to its investment-led growth and face growing risks from a...

Germany and the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia (the CE4) have been in a process of deepening economic integration which has lead to the development of a dynamic supply chain within Europe—the Germany-Central European Supply Chain (GCESC). Model-based simulations suggest two key...

We present a simple macroeconomic model with a continuum of primary commodities used in the production of the final good, such that the real prices of commodities have a factor structure. One factor captures the combined contribution of all aggregate shocks which have no direct effects on...

The paper reviews and draws lessons from the experience of fast growing economies including a sub-set of these termed High Growth Economies (HGEs) with a decadal rate of over 7 per cent. It then reviews the history of the Indian growth acceleration following the reforms of the 1990s and its...

One of the most important recent developments in international trade is the increasing interconnectedness of export production through a vertical trading chain network that streches across many countries, with each country specializing in particular stages of a good’s production. Using...

This Selected Issues Paper focuses on the economic and financial ties between Poland and the euro area and analyzes the associated spillovers. It documents stylized facts about trade, vertical integration, foreign direct investment, and banking system linkages between Poland and core euro area...