East Asian Financial Cooperation

This study examines the case for and against regional financial arrangements in East Asia, describes the Chiang Mai Initiative, compares it to financial arrangements in other regions. It speaks specifically to the concerns of American, European and multilateral organizations, assessing the pros and cons for the global system of such regional financial arrangements.

Since the Asian financial crisis of 1997OCo1998, there has been a deep and abiding desire on the part of Asian policy makers and opinion makers to enhance the region''s economic, monetary and financial self-sufficiency OCo or at least to ring-fence the region against financial instability and give it a louder voice in global financial affairs. There has been progress in these directions, notably in the form of the Chiang Mai Initiative of financial supports and the Asian Bond Market Initiative to build a single Asian financial market. But progress is hindered by disagreements among the principal national governments OCo Japan, China and South Korea OCo and resistance to the development of an Asian bloc from both Europe and the United States. This volume considers these issues from a number of different national and analytical perspectives. Scholars from all the relevant regions and countries are represented: Japan, China, Korea, Europe and the United States. While there have been a few previous books and articles concerned with the issue of Asian integration, this is one of the first volumes to successfully draw together top contributors from these different countries and regions to address the issues in a rigorous but relatively accessible way.

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.

"This paper argues that a regional financial architecture needs to be firmly established in East Asia, outlines recent developments in financial cooperation in the region, and provides possible directions for the future". -- p. 1.

The book intents to locate the process and effectiveness of cooperation in East Asia, to regard the construction of the East Asian community as the ideal, to see the contradictions and difficulties in construction as the reality, and to identify the actual development and achievement as the choice and effort between the two. The year of 1997 saw the Asian financial crisis, which turned out to be a disaster but also opened up an opportunity for East Asia to establish cooperation mechanisms. Starting with the crisis, this book examines the origin and development of the East Asian cooperation movement. More importantly, it investigates the obstacles and resistance, and provides insights into the cooperation within East Asia in the context of unstable political environments. Specifically, it expounds the East Asian Free Trade Area, monetary cooperation, as well as the cooperation within Northeast Asian and Asia-Pacific regions.

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.

East Asian countries were notably uninterested in regional monetary integration until the late 1990's, when the Asian financial crisis revealed the fragility of the region's exchange rate arrangements and highlighted the need for a stronger regional financial architecture. Since then, the countries of East Asia have begun taking steps to explore monetary and financial cooperation, establishing such initiatives as regular consultations among finance ministers and central bank governors and the pooling of foreign exchange reserves. In this book Ulrich Volz investigates the prospects for monetary cooperation and integration in East Asia, using state-of-the-art theoretical and empirical tools to analyze the most promising policy options. --