Foreign Asset Accumulation Among Emerging Market Economies: A Case for Coordination

Abstract

We develop a two-sector, core-periphery country general equilibrium framework with endogenous financial crises and argue for coordination on foreign asset accumulations among emerging market economies (EMEs). We show that a national planner in each peripheral country prefers a higher foreign asset position than the decentralized agents. This is consistent with the policy prescription derived in Bianchi (2011). However, a coordinator for all peripheral countries, who internalizes the effect of aggregate peripheral savings on the world interest rate, prefers a lower foreign asset position relative to the national planner. We find that uncoordinated foreign asset accumulations may even be inferior to decentralized equilibrium once we allow for a variable world interest rate. Our quantitative analysis shows that the coordinated level of net foreign assets for the peripheral countries is only 56% that of the uncoordinated level.