The Effects of Preferential Trade Agreements on Foreign Direct Investment: Evidence from the African Caribbean Pacific Region

Open Economies Review - Our empirical analysis utilises panel data on bilateral FDI stocks from 34 OECD countries into 45 ACP countries over the period 2000–2017 to consider the role of PTAs...     

Exchange-rate volatility, trade and “fixing for life” in Thailand

At the outset of the 1997 financial crisis, the quest to find a more suitable exchange-rate policy has become an urgent task facing the East Asian economies. One of the key policies agreed under Thailand’s August 1997 Letter of Intent (LOI) with the IMF was the adoption of a more flexible exchange-rate policy. However, the country re-adopted its pre-1997 crisis rigid exchange-rate policy in early 1999. To grasp this “fixing for your life” phenomenon, we test the impact of the exchange-rate volatilities of Thailand’s baht against the yen and the US dollar on the performance of the country’s bilateral trades with the two key partners.     

Is there an export or import-led productivity growth in rapidly developing Asian countries? a multivariate VAR analysis

In contrast to cross-country studies, the paper investigates the relationships between trade and labour productivity for nine rapidly developing Asian countries in a time-series framework using a vector error-correction model. Independent tests on the long-run and short-run relationship between trade variables of exports and imports and productivity are conducted. The results suggest that trade has an important impact on productivity and output growth in the economy, however it is imports that provide the important?‘virtuous’?link between trade and output growth. The results indicate that exports and imports have qualitatively different impacts on labour productivity. The long-run result shows that there is no causal effect from exports to labour productivity growth for Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan and Thailand; thereby suggesting that there is no export-led productivity growth in these countries. However, significant causal effects were found from imports to productivity growth, suggesting import-led productivity growth in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Taiwan. In addition, the results indicate that imports tend to have greater positive impact on productivity growth in the long run.     

A response surface analysis of critical values for the lead-lag ratio with application to high frequency and non-synchronous financial data

Granger causality tests are being supplanted by new methods such as the Lead-Lag Ratio, particularly in finance where data arrives at random times and systematic sampling often produces spurious results. Existing approaches are insufficient; outside of block-sampling using a bootstrap, the lead-lag ratio has generally been assessed against a benchmark of 1 without regard for statistical significance. We use simulations to generate a response surface for the Lead-Lag Ratio. Our modelled critical values are applied to reassess the findings of three previous studies of lead/lag relations between financial return series with high frequency data. Our response surface method proves to be a convenient and efficient alternative to using a bootstrap.