As economies have become more integrated, the importance of understanding how shocks in one country can affect the stability of others has grown. This article provides a summary of the 13 papers presented at the conference held in December 2010 by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and the Australian National University’s Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, titled “The transmission of international shocks to open economies”. The papers use a variety of methods to address some common themes, including directions for open economy modelling, the changing nature of emerging market economies (EMEs), the transmission of shocks during the recent global financial crisis, and the implications of being a small open economy for monetary policy. The different methodologies and topics provide a broad overview of the issues facing researchers and policy makers in open economies.