東亞區域金融合作的政治經濟分析 1997-2012

Abstract

Abstract The Asian financial crisis in 1997 heavily damaged some East Asian countries and induced cooperative dialogues among them. In 1999, financial cooperation officially staged itself among other topics of regional cooperation in ASEAN Plus Three (APT). Regional financial dialogues after 1999 focused on three important issues: emergency liquidity support, regional bond market and the birth of a possible common currency. In this dissertation, the concepts of “bias” and “mobilization of bias” are mobilized for analyzing the development of regional financial cooperation in the three issues. The Chiang Mai Initiative initiated by Japan and supported by APT unanimously in 2000 started the cooperation on emergency liquidity support, and has evolved into a multilateralized reserve pool of 240 billion dollars in size. Moreover, competition between China and Japan for leadership in East Asia not only stifled the AMF proposal, but also promotes CMI and CMIM. China and Japan, the biggest two in East Asia, share the common interest and sentiment as a camp of East Asian regionalism resist the globalist drive led by the U.S. for regaining regional autonomy on development path. The later developments in reducing the proportion of IMF-linked bail-out resources and the establishment of AMRO show consistency on pursuing regional autonomy as the management of financial crisis is concerned. As for the regional bond market cooperation, the dissertation offers its explanation of APT members’ choices between integrating market to enlarge regional bond market and keeping regulation on cross-border movement of capital to stabilize exchange rate. By analyzing the Annual Report on Exchange Arrangements and Exchange Restrictions 2011 and the actions that APT countries took in promoting the Asia Bond Fund and the Asian Bond Market Initiative, the author defines various preferences of individual APT countries for bond market cooperation and the priority of preserving exchange rate stable for some of them. Therefore, though the scale of local currency bond outstanding grows, mobilization of local bond markets is still in a low level. In addition, dispersed actions of APT countries in ABMI cooperation didn’t help enhancing the role of bond market in domestic finance, nor balancing the existing over reliance of local funding demand on banking. It is presented that the bias of the existing “East Asia dollar standard system” has contributed to Japan’s long lasting deflation. That’s why Japan keens to encourage regional monetary cooperation in East Asia for decomposing the system. Given this desire of Japan, the 1997 Asia financial crisis and the 2008 American subprime mortgage default presented golden chances for Japan to persuade her neighbors to join regional monetary cooperation. However, moving toward a regional common currency though helps reducing heavy reliance on dollar and releasing worries on devaluation of dollar reserves, the default of Euro zone countries extends the flaw of common currency cooperation as well. Considering that it takes time to form a regional common currency, as well as the issues declared in the flaws of Euro case, China unilaterally accelerates controllable RMB internationalization in 2009 as an alternative. Therefore, it is very unlikely to set off the necessary regional cooperation in constructing a common currency in a decade. RMB internationalization will continue to consume China’s motivation for participating common currency cooperation in East Asia. Besides, RMB internationalization is an acceptable solution to Japan for it’s helpful to decomposing the East Asia dollar standard system.