Unfinished Business

Abstract This article is about three phases in Australian trade policy: protectionism, unilateral liberalisation, and participation in regional trade liberalisation. Australia used to have one of the most protected economies in the world. The last dozen years have seen a radical transformation of Australian economic policy: Australia is in the process of becoming one of the most open economies in the world. The last five-to-ten years have also seen a related transformation of Australian foreign economic policy. This policy is now centrally concerned with promoting the process of international economic integration within the Asian region; particularly through the APEC process. Should Australia be pursuing ‘open regionalism’ in the Pacific? or promoting an Asia Pacific trading bloc? or concentrating on its own unilateral trade liberalisation? or using its energy to press for global liberalisation through the GATT? I argue that there remains a deep contradiction in the APEC process; that ‘open regionalism’ is in Australia's interests, and that the critical test of Australia's conversion to liberalisation will come in this third phase, in the future answers that it gives to these questions.     

The impact of Chinese monetary policy shocks on East and South‐East Asia1

We study the effects of Chinese monetary policy shocks on China's major trading partners in East and South‐East Asia by estimating structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) models for six economies in the region. We find that a monetary expansion in Mainland China leads to an increase in real GDP (temporary) and the price level (permanent) in a number of economies in our sample, most notably in Hong Kong and the Philippines. The impact could result from intertemporal substitution present in a general equilibrium framework, which allows for positive domestic impacts of foreign monetary expansions. Our results emphasize the growing importance of China for its neighbouring economies and the significance of Chinese shocks for the design of monetary policy in Asian economies.     

The endogeneity of the Optimum Currency Area criteria in East Asia

The Asian financial crisis in mid-1997 has increased interest in policies to achieve greater regional exchange rate stability in East Asia. It has renewed calls for greater monetary and exchange rate cooperation. A country's suitability to join a monetary union depends, inter alia, on the trade intensity and the business cycle synchronization with other potential members of the monetary union. However, these two Optimum Currency Area criteria are endogenous. Theoretically, the effect of increased trade integration (after the elimination of exchange fluctuations among the countries in the region) on the business cycle synchronization is ambiguous. Reduction in trade barriers can potentially increase industrial specialization by country and therefore resulting in more asymmetry business cycles from industry-specific shocks. On the other hand, increased trade integration may result in more highly correlated business cycles due to common demand shocks or intra-industry trade. If the second hypothesis is empirically verified, policy makers have little to worry about the region being unsynchronized in their business cycles as the business cycles will become more synchronized after the monetary union is formed. This paper assesses the dynamic relationships between trade, finance, specialization and business cycle synchronization for East Asian economies using a Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) approach. The dynamic panel approach improves on previous efforts to examine the business cycle correlations — trade link using panel procedures, which control for the potential endogeneity of all explanatory variables. Based on the findings on how trade, finance and sectoral specialization have effects on the size of common shocks among countries, potential policies that can help East Asian countries move closer toward a regional currency arrangement can be suggested. The empirical results of this study suggest that there exists scope for East Asia to form a monetary union.     

Australia and the Pacific Economy*

The industrialization and growth of East Asian countries has shifted the centre of world trade and economic activity towards the Pacific. There has already been a huge redirection of Australia's trade and external economic interests towards the region, based importantly on the emergence of Japan as a major economic power. Australia's future economic prospects will be significantly determined by how it manages its trade policy interests in the context of continuing East Asian industrialization. The most promising Australian trade policy approach is one which allies Australia's trading interests to those of East Asian countries in seeking to maintain an open non-discriminatory trade regime, supportive of the transformation of trade specialization necessary to the industrialization of resource-deficient countries, and which marries that objective to the liberalization of her own and Pacific country markets.     

ASIAN BUSINESS CYCLE SYNCHRONIZATION

This paper develops a multilevel structural factor model to study international output comovement and its underlying driving forces. Our method combines a structural vector autoregression with a multilevel factor model, which helps us understand the economic meaning of the estimated factors. Using quarterly data of real GDP growth covering 9 emerging Asian economies and G‐7 countries, we estimate a global supply factor, a global demand factor, and group supply and demand factors for each group of the economies. We find that although the role of the global factors has intensified over the past 15 years for most of the economies, output fluctuations in Asia have remained less synchronized with the global factor than those in the industrial countries. The Asian regional factors have become increasingly important in tightening the interdependence within the region over time. Therefore, although emerging Asian economies cannot ‘decouple’ completely from the advanced economies, they have, nonetheless, sustained a strong independent cycle among themselves. We also find that synchronized supply shocks contributed more to the observed synchronization in output fluctuations among the Asian economies than demand shocks. This points to the role of productivity enhancement and transmission of other supply shocks through, for example, vertical trade integration, rather than dependence on external demand, as the primary source of business cycle synchronization in emerging Asia.     

Exchange Rate Populism

East Asian and Latin American economies present opposite exchange rate electoral cycles: exchange rates tend to be more depreciated before and appreciated after elections among East Asian economies, while the opposite is true in Latin America. We propose an explanation for these empirical findings where the driving force of the opposite exchange rate populism in these two regions is their difference in the relative size of tradable and non‐tradable sectors, coupled with the distributive effect of exchange rates. In a setup where policy‐makers differ in their preference bias toward non‐tradable and tradable sectors, the exchange rate is used a noisy signal of the incumbent's type in an uncertain economic environment. The mechanism behind the cycle is engendered by the incumbent trying to signal he is median voter's type, biasing his policy in favor of the majority of the population before elections.     

HAS INTERNATIONAL CAPITAL MOBILITY INCREASED IN ASIA? EVIDENCE FROM THE POST‐1997 FINANCIAL CRISIS PERIOD

This paper examines whether international capital mobility in Asia has increased after the 1997 Asian financial crisis by estimating the Feldstein‐Horioka (FH) coefficients using panel cointegration and dynamic OLS regressions. In the benchmark estimation, we find that the FH coefficients of ten Asian economies decrease significantly from 0.65 during the pre‐crisis period to 0.32 during the post‐crisis period. Furthermore, the coefficient for the post‐crisis period is less statistically significant than that for the pre‐crisis period. The extended model estimations with additional control variables controlling for the business cycle, different foreign exchange rate systems, and capital control also show the results which are consistent with the benchmark estimation results. Rolling regressions show a consistently declining trend of the FH coefficients in Asia during our sample period. These results provide consistent evidence, according to the FH proposition, of increasing international capital mobility in Asia during the post‐1997 Asian financial crisis period. (JEL F36, F37, F21)     

Dynamics of Business Cycles in Asia: Differences and Similarities

The paper documents the extent of similarities and differences of business cycle characteristics of the Asian countries and compares the cyclical regularities in this region with those of the G‐7 countries. The Asian economies are generally more volatile than the G‐7 countries, but the amplitude of economic fluctuations in the Asian countries tends to decrease over time. Comovement and persistence properties of business cycles in the Asian countries are very similar to those of the G‐7 economies. The authors find that while the patterns of business cycle fluctuations in the main macroeconomic aggregates display important similarities, the behavior of fiscal and monetary policy variables exhibits significant differences across the Asian countries. Moreover, there is a high degree of comovement between the individual country business cycles and different measures of the Asian business cycle, indicating that there is a regional business cycle specific to the Asian countries.     

Meta‐Analysis of Chinese Business Cycle Correlation

We review previous research on China's business cycle correlation with other economies applying meta‐analysis. We survey 71 papers analysing the different periods of Chinese economic development since the 1950s that were published in English or Chinese. We confirm that Pacific Rim economies in particular have relatively high business cycle correlation with China. It appears that many characteristics of the studies and authors influence the reported degree of business cycle synchronization. For instance, Chinese‐language papers report higher correlation coefficients. Despite this, we do not detect robust evidence for publication bias in the papers. Moreover, we show that the broad evidence does not confirm the popular decoupling hypothesis.     

Oman's trade and opportunities of integration with the Asian economies

This paper investigates the determinants of trade between Oman and its major Asian trading partners in order to gauge the impact of the process of trade liberalisation. The empirical findings based on the gravity model indicate that Oman's imports from Asia are strongly determined by Asian population, Asian per capita gross domestic product (GDP), real exchange rates, distance and Oman's per capita GDP. The results also provide strong evidence that Oman's oil exports to Asia are strongly and equally determined by Asia's and Oman's population. Our findings reveal that while distance is not a friction to Oman's oil exports, it has a weak regressive effect on non-oil exports. Our results also indicate a negative but statistically insignificant effect of trade liberalisation on non-oil exports. These findings certainly have policy implications in terms of Oman–Asia trade relationship and in particular the need for more policy intervention to liberalise the non-oil exports sector so as to facilitate its wider integration within Asia.     

The 1997 Asian Currency Crisis,Financial Linkages,and the Monetary Policy of Japan

The evidence is examined that excessively liberal monetary policy by the Bank of Japan, before and after the financial collapse of Japan in 1992, may have led other East Asian economies into “over‐borrowing” and speculative investments, prior to the currency crisis in 1997–98. The authors test for cointegration and Granger causality between Japanese money supply M1 and the domestic investment of eight East Asian economies and Australia. US and German money supplies are also used as a benchmark. There is strong evidence that there are long‐ and short‐run causal relationships between the Japanese money supply and the domestic investment of the Asian crisis‐inflicted economies prior to 1997.     

The business cycle in a financially deregulated context: Theory and evidence

This article proposes Minsky's financial instability hypothesis (FIH) as a theoretical underpinning for a three‐regime business cycles model. Further, it is argued that the development of the FIH for open, developing economies (FIH‐ODE) provides a better understanding of the performance of business cycles in these economies, particularly during the last two decades. In support of these claims, a three‐regime autoregressive Markov switching model is estimated from 1980q1 to 2000q4 to Mexico's quarterly real GDP to investigate its business cycle behaviour. The estimated probabilities of the high and medium growth regimes suggest, for example, that after the financial liberalisation programme was fully launched, in the late 1980s, the economy shifted from the regime of medium to high growth (and vice versa) swiftly, reflecting its dependence on capital flows. Furthermore, the estimated parameters indicate that the average length of the business cycle has not changed.     

Business cycles synchronization in East Asian economy: Evidences from time-varying coherence study

This paper analyzes the feasibility of a monetary union in East Asia focusing on business cycles synchronization. Considering the critical role of trade integration in the East Asian integration process, we study whether East Asian countries are characterized by business cycle synchronization. The related empirical literature dedicated to business cycles synchronization in East Asia does not lead to firm conclusion. In this paper, we suggest a different empirical approach allowing, contrary to the previous studies, to detect endogenously structural changes in the comovement process between outputs. We apply a new measure based on the time-varying coherence function. Such a measure not only detects comovement dynamics but it distinguishes also this dynamics between short- and long-term. We compute also cohesion statistics to test if countries tend to be more synchronized or not. The main finding of this paper is that the increase in bilateral trade inside the East Asian region significantly improves long-run business cycle synchronization. The short-run influence of bilateral trade shows mixed results. Indeed, short-run cycles remain significantly influenced both by shocks hitting each country and by economic policy responses. As a consequence, more bilateral trade and convergence in economic policy constitute two complementary processes to promote business cycle synchronization.     

Is East Asia an optimum currency area?

This paper assesses the empirical desirability of the East Asian economies to an alternative exchange rate arrangement (a monetary union) that can potentially enhance the exchange rate stability and credibility in the region. Specifically, the symmetry in macroeconomic disturbances of the East Asian economies is examined as satisfying one of the preconditions for forming an Optimum Currency Area (OCA). We extend the existing literature by improving the methodology of assessing the symmetry shocks in evaluating the suitability of a common currency area in the East Asian economies employing the Bayesian State-Space Based approach. We consider a model of an economy in which the output is influenced by global, regional and country-specific shocks. The importance of a common regional shock would provide a case for a regional common currency. This model allows us to examine regional and country-specific cycles simultaneously with the world business cycle. The importance of the shocks decomposition is that studying a subset of countries can lead one to believe that observed co-movement is particular to that subset of countries when it in fact is common to a much larger group of countries. In addition, the understanding of the sources of international economic fluctuations is important for making policy decisions. The falling share of country specific factor and the rising role of region factor indicate that East Asia has become increasingly favorable for a monetary union. However, the share of country-specific factor that is still significant implies that it could be costly to renounce individual currencies to advance into a monetary union in East Asia.     

Level the Playing Field to Bolster the Boardroom: Sports as a Springboard for Women's Labor Force Advancement in Asia

We promote women's participation in sports as part of a solution to better integrate women into the labor force of Asian economies. Women in Asia lag other regions in terms of labor force participation and membership in corporate leadership bodies; this is particularly acute in East Asia. Involvement in sport has been found to be associated with long‐term economic benefits for women internationally, including enhanced returns to education and labor outcomes. We propose a number of sports program‐related policies for Asian countries to consider in order to better integrate women into education, society, labor, and corporate boardrooms.     

The extensive margin,sectoral shares,and international business cycles

Abstract This paper documents some previously neglected features of sectoral shares at business cycle frequencies in OECD economies. We find that the non‐traded output share is as volatile as aggregate GDP and for most countries is countercyclical. While the standard international real business cycle model has difficulty in accounting for these properties of the data, an extended model that allows for sectoral adjustment along both the intensive and the extensive margins does a much better job of replicating these statistics. The model also matches better the correlation between relative consumption growth and real exchange rate changes, a key measure of international risk‐sharing.     

THE SIZE OF FISCAL MULTIPLIERS AND THE STANCE OF MONETARY POLICY IN DEVELOPING ECONOMIES

Implementing fiscal programs during monetary policy expansions seems to improve significantly their economic stimulus. We find this result by estimating the effect of government consumption shocks on gross domestic product (GDP) using a panel of 23 developing economies. Our goal is to better understand the reasons for the low fiscal multipliers found in the literature by performing estimations for alternative exchange rate regimes, business‐cycle phases, and monetary policy stances. In addition, we perform counterfactual simulations to analyze the possible gains from fiscal‐monetary policy coordination. Our results also show lower multipliers in developing economies with flexible regimes, especially during economic slowdowns. (JEL E62, E63, F32)     

Population Ageing and Social Security in Asia

Asian countries are at different stages of demographic transition. While Central and South Asian countries are relatively young and will remain so for some time, East and Southeast Asia are expected to age at an unprecedented rate in the next few decades. Japan has reached the future first. Other nations, such as China, are still young but ageing faster than many advanced economies, including Australia and the USA. This demographic shift has considerable implications for the development of social policy. Here too, countries differ widely. This paper sets the context for the rest of the volume. The focus is mostly on countries in East and Southeast Asia, but it includes contrasting comparisons to key regional countries such as India and Australia. First, the paper presents the context: the demographic, urbanization, and social trends facing Asia. Second, it tackles the allocation of resources for the elderly, in particular, by summarizing approaches to two areas of social policy most pertinent to population ageing: retirement income and health care.     

Fiscal policy and economic activity in South Asia

This paper analyzes whether fiscal policy in South Asia amplifies or smoothens business cycle fluctuations. It estimates several econometric models to explore the cyclicality of government spending and tax buoyancy. In South Asia, tax revenue increases less than one to one with changes in gross domestic product (GDP), but public spending increases more than proportionally. For each percentage point change in GDP growth, government expenditure changes by 1.3 percentage points. While changes in tax revenue have no significant impact on economic activity, the government spending multiplier is positive and significant: each additional US dollar (USD) of spending leads to an immediate increase in GDP of 0.2 USD and to an increase of 0.4 USD in the medium run. The impact of public spending on economic activity is entirely due to capital expenditure, which is also more procyclical. Procyclical public spending and a positive expenditure multiplier imply that fiscal policy in South Asia amplifies boom‐and‐bust cycles. These results are in line with those of other emerging markets and developing economies and robust to different model specifications and estimation strategies.     

Regional Integration in East Asia: Achievements and Future Prospects

Economic integration in East Asia has been largely market driven. Attempts in the late 1980s to establish an East Asian regional economic grouping failed to materialize for a number of reasons. The financial crisis in 1997–1998 has strengthened the realization of regional countries that they need to have some self‐help mechanisms to overcome that crisis and to prevent future crises. This led to the development of several functional integration programs, including the network of bilateral swap arrangements known as the Chiang Mai Initiative. However, progress remains slow. The question that has arisen is how far these efforts need to be supported by institutional integration. Should the ASEAN Plus Three, the main regional cooperation process in East Asia involving the 10 South‐East Asian countries plus China, Japan, and South Korea, be deepened institutionally? Meanwhile, the region has seen the establishment of a new process, the East Asia Summit, involving the above 13 countries plus Australia, India, and New Zealand. How will these different arrangements contribute to East Asia's economic dynamism and prosperity as well as peace and political stability?