China's New Role in the International Financial Architecture

The rise of China is challenging the international financial architecture in a number of ways. This paper highlights three that are of critical importance: the challenge of absorbing massive Chinese savings; the incorporation of China into a cohesive global financial safety net; and the organisation of China's participation in funding the demand for international investment projects. The global financial architecture needs to be reformed. But what role should China play? The paper defines the options open to China and the opportunities and barriers it will face. We argue that China can work with the established economic powers in reforming the existing architecture. At the same time, China seeks cooperation in building new institutions and organisations that fill gaps in the existing arrangements. But no matter how international financial diplomacy plays out in the near term, deep financial and economic reform at home will alone deliver China a central role in the international financial architecture. Domestic reform could also attend to some of the challenges that currently plague China's impact on the system. The success or failure of these domestic reforms will be at the crux of the strength or fragility of the international financial architecture in the years ahead.     

Changing International Financial Architecture: Growing Chinese Influence?

It is often said that the 21st century will be the Asian century. Based on population and gross domestic product projections, it certainly looks as if this will be so. Will the existing international financial institutions give more voices, votes, and top positions to Asia? Or will Asia create its own institutions that would rival the old architecture? This present paper argues, first, that China, and possibly India, will be in a position to be so influential that the international financial architecture may have to go through significant changes. Second, the three large crises in the last 20 years have made Asian countries more confident that they can manage capital flows by accumulating large foreign reserves and by adopting sound macrofinancial policies. After 2009, China started to push various initiatives that will amount to creating its own sphere of influence with new regional institutions in the future.     

A modern reincarnation of Mundell-Fleming's trilemma

A modern incarnation of the trilemma is essential for understanding the evolving global financial architecture, and for coming up with ways to mitigate financial fragility. The scarcity of policy instruments relative to the policy goals implies complex country-specific tradeoffs between the policy goals. The financial crises of the 1990s induced Emerging markets to converge to trilemma's middle ground -- managed exchange-rate flexibility, controlled financial integration, and viable but limited monetary independence. Capital flight crises added financial stability to trilemma's policy goals. New policies were added to deal with financial fragility associated with financial integration, including precautionary management of international reserves by emerging markets, swap lines among OECD's central banks, and macroeconomic prudential regulations. These trade-offs are impacted by a country's balance sheet exposure to hard currencies, the exchange-rate regime, and the growing sensitivity to shocks emanating from the U.S. and the Eurozone in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis.     

Financial Integration in Emerging Asia: Challenges and Prospects

Using both quantity‐ and price‐based measures of financial integration, the paper shows an increasing degree of financial openness and integration in emerging Asia. Assessing the impact of a regional shock relative to a global shock on local equity and bond markets, the findings suggest that the region's equity markets are integrated more globally than regionally, although the degrees of both regional and global integration have increased significantly since the 1997/1998 Asian financial crisis. However, emerging Asia's local currency bond markets remain generally segmented, being neither regionally nor globally integrated. There are potential benefits from increased regional integration of financial markets. Financial integration at the regional level allows for the region's economies to benefit from allocation efficiency and risk diversification. Policymakers in the region must strike the right balance between maximizing the net benefits from regional and global financial openness, and minimizing the potential costs of financial contagion and crisis.     

International and Regional Cooperation: Asia's Role and Responsibilities

Asia has emerged from the global financial crisis as an important stabilizing force and an engine of global economic growth. The establishment of the G-20 gives Asian economies the global forum that they need to both represent their interests in global governance and deliver on responsibilities concomitant with their growing weight in the global economy. The region has a host of cooperation arrangements in APEC, ASEAN+3, and EAS (East Asian Summit), all with ASEAN as the fulcrum. They are huge assets, but they need to be repositioned to relate effectively to the G-20 process and other global arrangements. They also need to comprehend the politics of the changing structure of regional power. This paper discusses the challenges that Asia faces in aligning regional and global objectives in financial, trade, and other areas of cooperation, such as climate change and foreign investment. It argues that Asia is now a critical player in the global system and has a central contribution to make in strengthening global governance and international policy outcomes. The paper sets out ways to fill gaps in regional cooperation and link the agenda for regional cooperation more effectively to Asia's new role globally. This is essential to sustain Asia's superior growth performance, correct imbalances, and support the global economic system.     

Asia and the Reform of Global Governance

Asia's growing economic weight in the world economy is unlikely to produce substantial changes in global economic governance. National economic capabilities are not easily translated into influence over governance outcomes or institutions. Governments must deploy strategies of engagement with key institutions; incumbent powers will attempt counterstrategies. Coalition-building within and outside the region confronts substantial obstacles that reduce Asia's bargaining leverage. Asian preferences over institutional design and policies are unlikely to diverge from the status quo. A more pessimistic scenario includes resistance to global surveillance, spillover from other issue-areas, and defensive regionalism that undermines global institutions.     

American Economic Relations with Asia

The USA and Asia have an enormous stake in each others' continuing prosperity. This outcome is linked to the preservation of the open international economic order, which in turn faces challenges at both the interstate diplomatic level and at the domestic political level. The global financial crisis is probably the worst since the Great Depression and the domestic politics makes it increasingly difficult to formulate a constructive trade policy. In the absence of adequate reform at the global level, the alternative could be further fragmentation into competing regional blocs. Asia holds the key, combining both dissatisfaction with existing global arrangements with the resources to reconstitute, at least at the regional level, an alternative set of institutions and practices. How Asia responds, acting to strengthen reformed global institutions or undermine them in favor of regional alternatives, will partly depend on the policies of the dominant global power, the USA.     

How COVID-19 Medical Supply Shortages Led to Extraordinary Trade and Industrial Policy

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, a global shortage of hospital gowns, gloves, surgical masks, and respirators caused policymakers globally to panic. China increased imports and decreased exports of this personal protective equipment, removing supplies from world markets. Shortages led to European Union and US export controls as well as other extraordinary policy actions, including a US effort to reserve supplies manufactured in China by a US-headquartered multinational. By April 2020, China's exports had mostly resumed, and over the rest of the year its export volumes surged. But China's export prices also skyrocketed and remained elevated through 2020, reflecting severe and continued shortages. This paper explores these and other government actions, such as US trade war tariffs and US industrial policy in the form of over $1 billion of subsidies to build out its domestic personal protective equipment supply chain, as well as potential lessons for future pandemic preparedness and international policy cooperation.     

Fundamentals of Myanmar's Macroeconomy: A Political Economy Perspective

The serial underperformer of the region, Myanmar's economy is largely without the institutions and qualities necessary to achieve genuine economic growth. This paper explores the fundamentals of Myanmar's economy, from a perspective that emphasizes policy and institutional failure as the principal determinants of the country's present circumstances. The paper explores Myanmar's economy in a multifaceted way, examining concerns over economic growth, public finances, monetary and financial policies, corruption, and international trade. Notwithstanding the change in the form of Myanmar's governing institutions following the elections of November 2010, the paper concludes pessimistically as to the likelihood of meaningful economic reform in the foreseeable future.     

Financial Returnees as New Agents in East Asia: The Case of Korean Private Equity Funds

Although the standing of Anglo-American capitalism has been badly damaged by the global economic crisis, the return of the state in emerging markets is by no means assured. Over the past decade, financial processes originating in Anglo-American markets, such as derivatives, hedge funds and mergers and acquisitions (M&A), have made quiet headway in emerging markets. One of the transmission channels is financial returnees, defined as elites returning to domestic finance from either global finance abroad or from foreign financial institutions in their home countries. Many financial returnees pursue business agendas that parallel the Anglo-American model, while portraying themselves as local for domestic constituencies. These actions are now especially visible in the rise of private equity funds in emerging markets. This article defines the concept of a financial returnee and charts the impact of these individuals in importing the Anglo-American private equity model to Asia with Korea as the primary case study. Once foreign-controlled, the private equity industry in Korea is now domestically-run and financial returnees have been integral in this sector's short but important history.     

Fuelled Power: Oil,Financiers and Central Bank Policy in Nigeria

While the literature on business power and global finance has illuminated the ways in which financial institutions limit the policy autonomy of states in developing countries, we know much less about the circumstances under which the power of financiers is undermined. In this article, I advance explanations of these circumstances by arguing that state access to natural resource revenues reduces the power of financial institutions and enhances the capacity of the state to pursue central bank policies which violate the interests of major financiers. I employ a case study of central bank policy in Nigeria to probe this argument and find evidence that supports the claim that whenever the Nigerian government's access to resource revenues increased, the state's capacity to diverge from financiers’ preferred central bank policies and to advance its own preferences increased as well. The analysis provides the basis for broader propositions about the policy space of developing countries vis-à-vis financial institutions and the variability of structural power.     

Technical Progress and Its Fruits: The Idea of Development in the Works of Raul Prebisch

The Seventeenth Communist Party National People's Congress in 2007 declared, for the first time, that the Chinese government would create conditions and opportunities to promote property income growth in order to enhance common prosperity. This new policy on the one hand helps to garner support for the further financial reform in China; but on the other hand, it entails potentially adverse impacts on economic equality in China, given the current configuration of income and wealth distribution, uneven process of financial development and other socio-economic structures. Employing the Institutionalist theory on property and distribution, this paper explores the impacts of institutions and institutional changes in the financial system on income and wealth inequality in China.     

What drives international financial flows? Politics,institutions and other determinants

This paper uses a large panel of financial flow data from banks to assess how institutions affect international lending. First, employing a time varying composite institutional quality index in a fixed-effects framework, the paper shows that institutional improvements are followed by significant increases in international finance. Second, cross-sectional models also show a strong effect of initial levels of institutional quality on future bank lending. Third, instrumental variable estimates further show that the historically predetermined component of institutional development is also a significant correlate of international bank inflows. The results thus suggest that institutional underdeveloped can explain a significant part of Lucas [Lucas, Robert E. 1990. “Why Doesn't Capital Flow from Rich to Poor Countries?” American Economic Review (Papers and Proceedings), 80 (2): 92–96. 1990] paradox of why doesn't capital flow from rich to poor countries. The analysis also does a first-step towards understanding which institutional features affect international banking.     

THE EXCHANGE RATE IN THE JAPANESE ECONOMY: THE PAST,PUZZLES, AND PROSPECTS*

Selected topics in the literature on the exchange rate, in particular the yen, are reviewed from the viewpoint of some academic/practical puzzles. A survey is provided of past work covering use of the yen on PPP, covered and uncovered interest rate parity, the unbiasedness of expected future exchange rates, volatility spillover across borders and the effectiveness of intervention. The role of the yen in the international financial structure and its future role in global and regional financial markets are discussed.     

Asymmetric effect of exchange rate volatility on India's cross‐border trade: Evidence from global financial crisis and multiple threshold nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag model

This paper examines the asymmetric effect of exchange rate volatility on India's cross‐border trade with its major trading partners: Japan, Germany, the United States, and China. We extend previous studies in two ways. First, we examine whether global financial crisis changes the asymmetric effect of exchange rate volatility on India's cross‐border trade. Next, we divide exchange rate volatility into quintiles and examine the effect of each quintile on cross‐border trade by using the multiple threshold nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (MTNARDL) model. Our findings from standard nonlinear ARDL (NARDL) indicate that the asymmetric relationship between exchange rate volatility and cross‐border trade changes as a result of global financial crisis. In addition, findings from MTNARDL indicate that in short‐run, exchange rate volatility symmetrically affects India's cross‐border trade with all sample countries whereas in long‐run it asymmetrically affects cross‐border trade. Overall, these findings are very important for policy implications and open a new dimension to exchange rate volatility and trade flows.     

Global Financial Crisis and ASEAN: Fiscal Policy Response in the Case of Thailand and Indonesia

Sound macroeconomic and financial fundamentals, plus quick and forceful fiscal policy responses contributed to Thailand's and Indonesia's economic recovery in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. This paper reviews the impacts of the recent global financial crisis on the Thai and Indonesian economies, and identifies the characteristics of the fiscal stimulus package in each economy and their implications to counter the negative impact of the global financial crisis.     

公允价值与金融危机新论

2008年全球金融危机暴露出公允价值计量的缺陷与不足,会计准则制定机构迫于压力对公允价值应对金融危机作出修订与完善。文章在分析公允价值的涵义与特性的基础上,厘清公允价值与全球金融危机之间的关系,提出改进公允价值的建议。     

协同创新网络成员关系对企业协同创新绩效的影响——以生物制药产业为例

利用209家生物制药企业协同创新现状的调查数据,验证了企业在协同创新网络中的关系数量、关系结构、关系强度及成员间信任度对其协同创新绩效的影响。结果表明:大学及研究机构无论在关系数量还是在关系强度方面对企业协同创新绩效的影响都是最为显著的;生物制药企业需要加强与供应商、中介机构和同行业企业的网络联系,并重视提高与政府、金融机构及行业内外其他企业的联系频率;在网络结构方面,企业应着重成为大学、研究机构、同行业企业、客户及金融机构的中心,并加强对大学、研究机构、行业内外企业、中介机构、政府和金融机构等创新主体的依赖性;合作通过企业介绍的数量主要影响绩效中的技术标准制定,企业与客户间相互信任也对企业技术标准制定产生正向影响。     

Effects of deregulation on failing thrift institutions

The purpose of this paper is to test the hypothesis that much of the decline in the net worth of the failing saving and loan institutions was a result of deregulation. Variables are developed to represent major actions to deregulate S&Ls activities and to measure the impacts on institutions' net worth. A mixed cross-section&z.urule;time series analysis is developed to estimate the effects of financial deregulation on failing thrifts' net worth. The data are 1984-89 balance sheet adn income statement data for thrift institutions, prior to the enactment of the 1989 legislation to solve the crisis. The reuslts of the analysis indicate that deregulation of asset and deposit activities was not the cause of the financial distress of failing US thrift institutions. The primary cause appears to be the increase in the federal deposit insurance limit to $100 000 and how attractive this legislative action made brokering deposits that became insured up to $100 000.     

OPTIMAL FOREIGN BORROWING REVISITED

Foreign capital has become increasingly important in financing investment and growth in developing countries. Foreign capital flows, however, can be volatile as is evident from the recent financial crises. It has also recently been noted by researchers that there is little systematic empirical evidence that foreign capital contributes to the economic growth of developing countries. In this context, this paper attempts to theoretically reevaluate the borrowing behaviour of a developing economy that relies on foreign borrowing for its capital formation. In particular, this paper investigates the implications of different lending policies of international financial institutions. It is found that no matter whether the borrowing interest rate increases with the level of foreign debt per capita or with the foreign‐capital/total‐capital ratio, the economy always moves toward the stationary state. The result holds even when the representative agent regards the interest rate given as constant. This implies that foreign borrowing does help economic growth, irrespective of lending policies of international financial institutions.