With partial support from the National Science Foundation, the Asia Pacific Center for Economics and Business at Brandeis University will purchase equipment and software required to link its faculty and graduate student computers directly to Internet and to each other in a local area network. The LAN is essential to allow faculty members to share software, data and conferencing capabilities as they participate in research and communicate with distant colleagues. The LAN will also allow graduate students to work as research assistants and to undertake research papers and theses on the own based on these shared data sets. Together with The East West Center in Hawaii and Keio University in japan, Brandeis is playing a lead role in developing an electronic research network connecting newly created Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Study Centers (APEC) in all eighteen participating countries. The focus of the research collaboration is to study the impact of economic integration and of potential SPEC policies designed to accelerate integration of various sectors and APEC countries. The three research teams plan to share data, ideas and models, and to join their findings in different fields through a family of computable general equilibrium models. The project will emphasize three issues critical to understanding economic integration: the likely effects of reducing tariff and non-tariff barriers; the effect of economic integration on labor; the relation between regional integration and direct foreign investment on a number of economic factors. The instrumentation provide will further research in all these areas and also assist in student education.
