This thesis is a collection of essays on the effect of trade costs on international trade. Chapter 1 derives and empirically examines how factor proportions determine the structure of commodity trade when international trade is costly. It combines a many-country version of the Heckscher-Ohlin...

Before the financial crisis, a number of east Asian economies managed their exchange rates with the aim of stabilising the value of their currency against a basket of key major currencies, but overwhelmingly the US dollar (Frankel and Wei 1994). This suited these economies in the first half of...

Conclusion: This paper has assessed the empirical relationship between exchange rate volatility and survey measures of household and business confidence in Australia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, and Singapore. Caution needs to be used in interpreting this relationship, because the number of...

There is a growing appetite in East Asia for thinking about ways to deepen economic and financial policy dialogue, cooperation and integration. This paper aims to inform that debate by examining what data on output, consumption and investment in East Asia reveal about linkages and commonality in...