The past few decades have seen an increasing amount of debate concerning economic integration within East Asia1, with the backdrop of rapidly growing economies in Asia2. The economic integration in Asia has, it seems, progressed in terms of the evolution of the international division of labor amongst such countries as China, Japan, South Korea, and other ASEAN countries, along with increases in...

In recent years, ASEAN has been accelerating its efforts to establish the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) by 2015. As a member of ASEAN, Myanmar has a mandate to implement a number of policy reforms, as agreed to in the AEC Blueprint. Key reforms include trade liberalization and facilitation in accordance with the ASEAN Trade in Goods Agreement (ATIGA), investment liberalization and facilitation...

In light of the longstanding vision of economic and monetary integration in the ASEAN region and the importance of coordinating monetary policies to achieve it, the objective of this paper is to the assess the monetary policy synchronization among the founding members of the ASEAN, i.e., Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. Due to the importance of exchange rate movements t...

It has almost been a rule, whenever ASEAN Leaders gather in the resort town of Bali, Indonesia, there will be a major development to the regional organisation to watch out for. This year, the 19th ASEAN Summit will be held in Bali again. The clues for the hype this year are well reflected in Indonesia’s Chairmanship theme for ASEAN this year “ASEAN Community in a Global Community of Nations”, w...

This paper examines the relationship of financial liberalization and stock markets integration among ASEAN-5 (Note 1) stock markets: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. Three sample periods are covered based on the progress of financial liberalization. By using Johansen and Juselius multivariate cointegration procedures, Granger-causality tests and variances decomposit...

This study contributes to the on–going worldwide debate on the future form of banking systems by examining the performance of a socialist ASEAN system—Vietnam—with four other ASEAN but capitalist and transition economies—Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia and China. The study finds that over the 1996–2009 period, the Vietnamese banking system may have performed better than the comparator countrie...