Abstract
This paper investigates the impact of major world equity markets on four founding countries of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). With a population of 1.47 billion, SAARC is the largest regional organization in the world. However, the issue of global integration of equity markets of the SAARC nations has largely been ignored. This study fills this important gap, adding results towards the ongoing debate concerning the issue of global market integration. After the onset of the financial crises of 2008, this issue is imperative. VAR analysis is used to determine whether there is any dependency of SAARC return on the performance of world equity markets. Further, GARCH-in-mean modeling is used to determine whether there is any evidence of Volatility spillover. It is found that volatility in major world markets do not impact returns in SAARC nation, but ample evidence of volatility spillover is found for India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Similar results are not obtained for Pakistan.