Recently, a new resolve for both increased economic integration and monetary and exchange rate cooperation has started to emerge in ASEAN, especially since the 19971998 Asian financial crisis. According to the optimum currency area theory, the degree of trade integration is one most important criterion for joining a currency union. The large increase in intra-ASEAN trade in recent years natural...

To examine how changes in relative national prices affect trade flows, this study estimates the impact of industry-specific effective real exchange rates on industry-level balances, exports, and imports. We analyze variations intra-industry vertical specialization, which may both govern long-run relationship between flows. employ sample information from 13 manufacturing industries across five A...

Recent theoretical models predict gains from international trade coming from intra-industry reallocations, due to a firm selection effect. In this paper we answer two related questions. First, what is the magnitude of this selection effect, and how does it compare to that of intra-national trade? Second, would the removal of ’behind-the-border’ trade frictions between integrated EU countries le...

The paper analyses vertical intra-industry trade between EU and Accession countries, and concentrates on two country-specific determinants: Differences in personal income distribution and in technology. Both determinants have a strong link to national policies and to cross-border investment flows. In contrast to most other studies, income distribution is not seen as time-invariant variable, but...

U.S. foreign trade has grown much more rapidly than GDP in recent decades. But there is no consensus as to why. More than half of U.S. foreign merchandise trade consists of armslength and intra-firm trade by multinational corporations (MNCs). But prior empirical work on the growth of trade has not focused on the role of MNCs. To better understand the growth of trade, it is important to understa...

In this paper the relationship between three types of trade specialization is analyzed for the period 1990 to 2000. For nine East-Asian countries and the United States the developments in international fragmentation, export specialization and intra-industry specialization are investigated. Asian countries, and specifically China, now play a larger role in international trade. The formation of p...

In this paper theoretical and empirical models of intra-industry trade are developed in which economic activities, based on measurement and an associated measurement infrastructure, play a role in creating product variety. The paper discusses how the measurement infrastructure which includes institutions conducting metrological research and standard setting organization reduces transactions cos...

This paper develops a simple multi-country model with imperfect labour markets to study the effect of labour market frictions – reflected in the compression of the gap in factor returns of capital versus labour – on bilateral trade flows. We use a framework that allows for goods trade and capital mobility and show that labour market imperfections exert opposite effects in the absence (the short...