Motivated by the unprecedented rise of swap agreements between the central banks of developed economies and their developing economy counterparts, this paper evaluates Asian swap arrangements and their association with the build-up of foreign reserves prior to the 2008-2009 global financial...

Structural change has a far-reaching impact on inequality. It exposes the population to challenges and opportunities. Foreign trade and technological progress have been widely put forth as a structural driver of inequality. Broader structural change, such as demographic transition, can also...

In the run-up to the financial crisis, the world economy was characterized by large and growing current account imbalances. Since the onset of the crisis, the People's Republic of China and the United States have rebalanced. As a share of gross domestic product, their current account imbalances...

This paper explores the stability of the key conditioning variables accounting for real estate valuation before and after the crisis of 2008 - 2009, in a panel of 36 countries, for the period of 2005:I - 2012:IV, recognizing the incidence of global financial crisis. Our paper validates the...

This study provides new evidence of systemic risk contribution in the international mutual fund sector from 2000 - 2011. The empirical analysis tracks the systemic risk of 10,570 mutual funds investing internationally. The main findings suggest that the systemic risk contributions of...

Driven by the increasingly important role of supply chains in global production, this paper studies empirical association between global credit-market shocks and firm behavior towards liquidity needs across countries and industries. Focusing on the adjustment of working-capital financing, we...

Old-age income support is becoming an issue of growing importance throughout Asia. This is especially true in East and Southeast Asia where the population is aging. This paper provides a broad overview of the current state of pension systems in the People's Republic of China, Indonesia, Republic...

Galvanized by the devastation of the Second World War, European countries achieved a historically unprecedented and unparalleled level of regional economic integration in the postwar period. Intensive cooperation between the two biggest powers of continental Western Europe, France, and Germany,...

During decades of market development, the individual financial markets of the member economies of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have been progressively incorporated into regional and international markets. The aim of this study is to explore and measure the strength and...

This paper studies factors associated with firm participation in export markets, focusing primarily on firm size and access to credit, based on a survey sample comprising observations of 8,080 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) (with fewer than 100 employees) and non-SME firms in developing...