Currency And Contest In East Asia

Grimes uses primary research and interviews with scores of participants and policy analysts to provide the most accurate, complete, and detailed description available of attempts to build financial cooperation among East Asian countries.

Since the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98, East Asian economies have sought to make themselves less vulnerable to global financial markets by transforming the regional financial architecture. With Japan as a leading actor, they have introduced initiatives to provide emergency financing to crisis economies, support the development of local-currency bond markets, and better coordinate currency policies. In Currency and Contest in East Asia, William W. Grimes builds on years of primary research and scores of interviews with participants and policy analysts to provide the most accurate, complete, and detailed description available of attempts to build financial cooperation among East Asian countries. Adapting realist political economy theory to the realities of contemporary global finance, Grimes places regional issues firmly in the wider context of great-power rivalries. He argues that financial regionalism can best be understood as one arena for competition among Japan, the United States, and China. Despite their mutual desire for regional prosperity and economic stability, these three powers have conflicting political interests. Their struggles for regional leadership raise questions about the long-term feasibility of regional financial cooperation, the possible effects of Sino-Japanese rivalry on regional financial stability, and the potential for East Asian financial regionalism to undermine the long-established-albeit waning-global and regional dominance of the United States and the dollar.

This book explores the opportunities and limits of currency cooperation in East Asia. Currency issues play an important role in the region. The Asian crisis of the late 90s was rooted in deficient currency arrangements. The Chinese RMB is not freely convertible yet, but policymakers in China nevertheless aim for a more international role of the Chinese currency. The recent change of direction in Japanese monetary policy caused a drastic depreciation of the Yen and led to warnings against a possible “currency war”, thus demonstrating that currency issues can also easily lead to political frictions. Most trade in and with the East Asian zone on the other hand is still conducted in US $. Against this background different modes of currency cooperation serve the goal of smoothing exchange rate fluctuations and capital flows. They are an important element to promote financial stability and to reduce the transaction cost for foreign trade or investment. The contributions of this book analyze the environment and design of currency cooperation in East Asia and their effects from a macro-and microeconomic viewpoint.

The book analyses the Asian experience from both Asian and European perspectives.

East Asian exchange rates have become a global flashpoint. U.S. policymakers blame artificially low Asian currency values for global imbalances, including America's ballooning current account deficit. The solution, they argue, lies in some combination of greater exchange rate flexibility and the appreciation of Asian currencies against the dollar. Asian officials recognize the need to let their exchange rates rise, but they fear that would hamper growth and cut sharply into the value of their dollar reserves. Toward an East Asian Exchange Rate Regime offers a timely and comprehensive analysis of the resulting debates, drawing on expertise from China, Japan, South Korea, and the United States. The introduction reviews the issues at stake, sketches a variety of proposed exchange rate regimes, and discusses comparisons between East Asia and the West. Subsequent chapters examine the connection between global financial imbalances and East Asian monetary cooperation, China's potential role in regional coordination, the relationship between monetary and trade integration, and different paths toward regional cooperation. Authoritative yet concise, this is an essential primer on East Asian monetary integration. Contributors include Gongpil Choi (Korean Institute of Finance, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco), Masahiro Kawai (University of Tokyo, Asian Development Bank), Kwanho Shin (Korea University), Yunjong Wang (SK Institute), Masaru Yoshitomi (RIETI,Tokyo), and Yongding Yu (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences).

The global financial crisis and the Eurozone crisis have led to a profound rethink in East Asia about the international monetary system and regional monetary and financial integration. After the East Asian crisis of 1997, deeper regional cooperation was seen as the way to avoid reliance on the IMF and the rest of the world. Steps were taken, but they were limited because of disagreements reflecting regional rivalries. Still, integration into the global financial system and Europe's regional process were seen as objectives to be adapted to East Asia, as detailed in an overview chapter. The crises have shaken this strategy but also revealed the pre-existing deep disagreements. This book presents contributions by scholars from different countries. Each one was invited to describe the vision of their policymakers. The traidtional rivalry between China and Japan, the region's largest economies, reveals Chinese confidence into its rising power and Japanese growing doubts about its ability to weigh on the debate. For opposite reasons, both display a declining interest into regional cooperation. Korea and the ASEAN countries do not wish to choose between the regional powers but remain attached to regional cooperation and integration. They look for pragmatic solutions that recognize the value-chain characteristic of trade. Additional contributions by US and European scholars provide evaluations of the global and Eurozone crises and of their relevance for East Asian integration.

The policy dilemmas inherent in using the US dollar as the key currency for stabilizing exchange rates in East Asia.