Over the past decade, Asia-Pacific economies have made significant progress in developing private housing markets and market-based systems for financing home purchases. However, development has been uneven across countries due to the heterogeneity in market infrastructure and economic development. This special feature documents structural characteristics of national housing markets in Asia, foc...

â â â â â  abstract: â  as the number of independent countries increases and their economies become more integrated, we would expect to observe more multi-country currency ::::union::::s. this paper explores the pros and cons for different countries to adopt as an anchor the us dollar, the euro or the yen. in addition, it addresses the question of how co-movement of outputs and prices would res...

the purpose of this article is the measurement of technical efficiency and returns to scale using data envelopment (dea) approach. in this study, we have measured efficiency quantity and economies of scale for state owned insurance and private companies for 1384-1385 periods. the results reveal that in the dea with the assumption of variable returns to scale, iran, tosee and razi companies have...

in the era of globalization, particularly, since early 1990s, economies around the world have been affected considerably by co-movements in one or more countries. in the literature this phenomenon is recognized as synchronization in business cycles, while joint policies being conducted by trading partners can modify such effects properly. the objective of this paper has been to evaluate a possi...

in welfare economic studies, because of the differences among households scale, we cannot consider household expenditures without attention to this factor. a simple method to consider household scale in welfare analysis is the usage of the per capita expenditure. but, the usage of per capita expenditure ignores economies of scale. in fact, per capita expenditure is a biased variable, and underv...

This paper uses a variant of the IMF’s Global Economy Model (GEM) to illustrate how the macroeconomic impact on the United States of the rise in energy prices since the end of 2003 may vary depending on the source of the energy market imbalance. If oil market supply-side factors are driving prices higher, GDP will be permanently lower than it otherwise would be. However, if higher energy prices...

This paper presents a brief overview of the extant fiscal situation in South Asian countries. In particular, I emphasize low tax/GDP ratios and inelastic expenditure/GDP ratios which then lead to structurally entrenched fiscal deficits. The paper also reports on the sustainability of fiscal and current account deficits in the South Asian countries. Finally, the paper reports on some important i...

This paper investigates how the environmental pollution in East Asian countries can be affected by trade of ‘dirty’ goods with Japan and the USA. By controlling for trade openness, the share of manufacturing in GDP, and the trade of pollution-intensive products with Japan and the USA, CO2 emissions are estimated for ten East Asian countries between 1988 and 2000. Our results show that increasin...

Sex, Race, and Job Satisfaction among Highly Educated Workers* There has been a considerable amount of work focusing on job satisfaction and sex, generally finding that women are more satisfied than men despite having objectively worse job conditions. But there is little evidence on whether job satisfaction differs by race or ethnicity. We use data from the 2010 National Survey of College Gradu...

Until now, the value of inter-country trade within South Asian nations has been low. While similarities in the exports profiles can be seen as a reason for this low value of trade, it might not be a valid one, especially given the presence of growing South Asian income. The intraindustry trade theory suggests that complementarity might actually increase trade in the presence of a rising income....