Financial crisis and cointegration of systemic risk in Southeast Asian banking

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the banking sector integration through a cointegration analysis of bank systemic risk in ASEAN-5 from 1998 to 2013 by taking financial crises into consideration. Our empirical findings highlight that there is one cointegrating vector in general, suggesting that the ASEAN-5 banking sectors are not completely segmented in terms of systemic risk. A closer investigation, however, reveals that the banking sectors were completely segmented during the 1997/1998 Asian financial crisis (AFC) and partially segmented during the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC). The latter might indicate an improvement in banking sector integration in several countries of ASEAN-5 during the GFC compared to during the AFC. Hence, this paper highlights that the agenda of banking sector integration in ASEAN-5 should consider the influence of financial crises to ensure the effectiveness of cross-border crisis management protocol when the ASEAN-5 banking sector tends to be segmented in times of crisis. In general, portfolio diversification in ASEAN-5 also remains beneficial for global investors in banking. JEL Classification : F36, G21, G28 DOI: https://doi.org/10.26905/jkdp.v23i4.3669