This paper argues that in the aftermath of the global economic crisis, the centralized international monetary architecture or the global financial safety net (GFSN) set up at the Bretton Woods conference is evolving towards a more decentralized multilayered safety net comprising (i) the G20 at...

This paper argues that calls for a New Bretton Woods system in the aftermath of the global economic crisis - similar to the remarkable 1944 Bretton Woods conference that led to the establishment of various international economic institutions - are unlikely to be answered. The likely scenario is...

"Until recently, not much attention had been paid to the need to promote regional monetary and financial cooperation. This is surprising as cooperation in finance provides more opportunities for "win-win" situations. However, the pace of monetary and financial cooperation has picked up in the...

This paper reviews trends in East Asian regionalism in the areas of trade and investment, money and finance, and infrastructure. It presents various measures of trade and financial integration. An important finding of the paper is that increasing trade and financial integration in the region is...

This paper examines whether increasing trade intensity among East Asian countries has led to a synchronization of business cycles. It extends the work of Shin and Wang (2004) in two ways: by (i) improving the specification of their business cycle correlation equation, and (ii) extending the...

Nepal's lackluster economic performance during the post-conflict period (that is, after November 2006) has been driven by remittances from the export of labor services and the improved performance of the agricultural sector, which is still very much weather dependent. The authors make the case...

The strong recovery of the five crisis-affected countries of East Asia between 1999 and 2000 has revived the debate on the causes of the 1997 financial crisis. Initially there had been an emerging consensus that the crisis had originated from the capital account. However, some analysts see the...

Trump's withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and his "America First" trade agenda ignite a second round of interest in mega-free trade agreements in the Asia-Pacific. Countries are evaluating alternative trade policy actions in a post-TPP era. Using national real GDP gains...