East Asian Crisis Research Articles

Stock Prices and Exchange Rates: Are they Related? Evidence from South Asian Countries

The issue of whether stock prices and exchange rates are related or not has received considerable attention after the East Asian crisis. During the crisis the countries affected saw turmoil in both currency and stock markets. If stock prices and exchange rates are related and the causation runs from exchange rates to stock prices, then the crisis in the stock markets can be prevented by controlling the exchange rates. Moreover, developing countries can exploit such a link to attract/stimulate foreign portfolio investment in their own countries. Similarly, if the causation runs from stock prices to exchange rates then authorities can focus on domestic economic policies to stabilise the stock market. If the two markets/prices are related then investors can use this information to predict the behaviour of one market using the information on other market.1 Most of the empirical literature that has examined the stock prices-exchange rate relationship has focused on examining this relationship for the developed countries with very little attention on the developing countries. The results of these studies are, however, inconclusive. Some studies have found a significant positive relationship between stock prices and exchange rates [for instance Smith (1992); Solnik (1987) and Aggarwal (1981)] while others have reported a significant negative relationship between the two [e.g., Soenen and Hennigar (1998)]. On the other hand, there are some studies that have found very weak or no association between stock prices and exchange rates [for instance, Franck and Young (1972); Bartov and Bodnor (1994)].

A multicountry measure of comovement and contagion in international markets: definition and applications

This paper introduces a new measure of comovement and contagion of crises between countries, applies it to 16 world crises, including the current COVID-19 pandemic, and provides insights regarding the occurrence of contagion during these crises. Our measure demonstrates several important advantages over the extant measures of contagion. Traditional measures of contagion, such as increase in correlation, could be limited in scope since they are bivariate, whereas contagion is often a regional or global market phenomenon. The multiple comparisons that the binary correlations require in such cases could yield inconclusive or contradictory results and fail to capture the broad effects of the crisis on the regions. Moreover, during crises, a country’s stock market volatility often increases, a phenomenon that could lead to a spurious indication of increased correlation with other countries (contagion). Corrections for this bias have been suggested, but they could adversely affect the power of the contagion tests and fail to detect genuine contagion. Using simulations, we show the robustness of our measure to changes in volatility and demonstrate its power to affirm instances of genuine contagion. Support for the power of our measure relative to an extant leading measure of contagion is also provided by analysis of the cases of the 1994 Mexican peso crisis, the 1997 East Asian crisis, and Black Monday, the 1987 US stock market crash.

Two Crises Separated by a Decade: Political Economy of Trade Strategy and Reserves Accumulation in East Asia

This article seeks to explore the relationship between the global financial crisis (2007–2009) and the East Asian crisis (1997–1999) via the contribution of select East Asian countries, which led to the formation of the ‘global imbalance’, that is, experience of substantial and consistent current account surplus. Taking a cue from Bernanke’s ‘savings glut’ hypothesis, which has held ‘global imbalance’ to be a factor behind the global financial crisis, specifically, the article argues that in these countries, the nature of current account balance has undergone a sea change since the end of the 1990s. They also accumulated a substantial amount of foreign exchange reserves since then along with a major shift of trade regime and consequent trade surplus in all these countries. The article conjectures that the mishandling of the rescue package by International Monetary Fund could have induced them to go aggressively for accumulation of forex reserves. Thus, the two crises separated by a decade and in different continents are, indeed, linked through providing an incentive for brewing up of global imbalance via an activist trade policy in select East Asian countries. Seen in this context and from this standpoint, the two crises, indeed, appear to be close siblings! JEL Codes: F41, F62, O53

Exploring the role of green innovation and investment in energy for environmental quality: An empirical appraisal from provincial data of China

To better analyze China's carbon neutrality target, this study investigates the effect of green innovation and investment in the energy industry on China's provincial and regional data from 1995 to 2017. Using Westerlund and Edgerton's panel cointegration test, the authors found a stable long-run relationship between CO2 emissions and its determinants. We found that under major structural breaks at the local, regional, and global levels, such as the East Asian crises of 1997, the financial crises of 2007–2008, China's RMB exchange rate reform announced on August 11, 2015, and mild recession in 2001, CO2 emissions, income, green innovation, renewable energy use, and energy industry investment are cointegrated. The environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis is valid. In the long run, income, environmental innovation, investment in the energy industry, and renewable energy consumption are key contributors in explaining CO2 emissions. The empirical evidence from augmented mean group (AMG) is consistent with the estimates of CS-ARDL. Concerning practical implications, the findings suggest that there is a need to switch the Chinese economy to more sustainable sources of energy, a viable solution to abate environmental degradation. China should introduce and shift investments to green innovation.

The Time-Variant Sources of Inflation and Inflation Volatility and Their Interrelations and Effects on Macroeconomic Fluctuations: Evidence from Indonesia and Thailand

Indonesia and Thailand, two major open economies in Southeast Asia which operate under ‘managed-float’ exchange rate systems, have remained susceptible to both the external and domestic shocks since the East-Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. Unlike the standard monetary-policy literature, these countries have introduced ‘flexible inflation targeting’ as the monetary policy strategy under managed- float exchange rate systems. Although these countries have managed to keep inflation low on average in a low-inflation environment, inflation has however remained highly volatile. This paper attempts to answer how significant are external shocks, relative to domestic shocks, as the drivers of inflation and inflation volatility for these countries? The paper uses a Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) modelling framework and monthly macroeconomic data over the period 2000M1-2015M12. The empirical results suggest that in both countries, (i) inflation is more sensitive to external shocks relative to domestic shocks, which is consistent with the inflation globalization hypothesis; (ii) Inflation volatility however remains sensitive to both the external and domestic shocks; (iii) As expected, inflation and inflation volatility exhibit a feedback relation between them, which is consistent with the Friedman-Ball and Cukierman-Meltzer propositions. The paper also highlights that inflation and inflation volatility affect the real interest and exchange rates, which affect real output and asset prices. The paper concludes that Indonesia and Thailand can make monetary policy more effective for maintaining price stability if they make the exchange rates more flexible to ameliorate the effects of external shocks on these economies.

The Time-Variant Sources of Inflation and Inflation Volatility and Their Interrelations and Effects on Macroeconomic Fluctuations: Evidence from Indonesia and Thailand

Indonesia and Thailand, two major open economies in Southeast Asia which operate under ‘managed-float’ exchange rate systems, have remained susceptible to both the external and domestic shocks since the East-Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. Unlike the standard monetary-policy literature, these countries have introduced ‘flexible inflation targeting’ as the monetary policy strategy under managed- float exchange rate systems. Although these countries have managed to keep inflation low on average in a low-inflation environment, inflation has however remained highly volatile. This paper attempts to answer how significant are external shocks, relative to domestic shocks, as the drivers of inflation and inflation volatility for these countries? The paper uses a Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) modelling framework and monthly macroeconomic data over the period 2000M1-2015M12. The empirical results suggest that in both countries, (i) inflation is more sensitive to external shocks relative to domestic shocks, which is consistent with the inflation globalization hypothesis; (ii) Inflation volatility however remains sensitive to both the external and domestic shocks; (iii) As expected, inflation and inflation volatility exhibit a feedback relation between them, which is consistent with the Friedman-Ball and Cukierman-Meltzer propositions. The paper also highlights that inflation and inflation volatility affect the real interest and exchange rates, which affect real output and asset prices. The paper concludes that Indonesia and Thailand can make monetary policy more effective for maintaining price stability if they make the exchange rates more flexible to ameliorate the effects of external shocks on these economies.

Foreign Portfolio Investment And Macroeconomic Factors In India

Foreign Portfolio Investment (FPI) is a part of worldwide capital flows comprising of put out of monetary assets such as currency, supply or bonds across global borders in wish for earnings. FPI is a sole entity, which either boosts or impedes Indian economy and savings approach with each of momentary waft. For the period of behind 1980s and near the beginning 1990s portfolio savings emerged as a most essential type of resources inflow to growing countries. The consequence of portfolio savings to budding countries has arrived downward once the East Asian crisis of 1997. On the additional, most other emergent countries, India is at a standstill more reliant in the lead of Foreign Portfolio Investment (FPI) than Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) as a resource of foreign investment. Foreign Portfolio Investment inflows and outflows have a direct impact on Indian economy. One of the majority imperative features of the expansion of Indian economy in the last twenty years has been the mounting participation of FPI. Portfolio investment being an immediate verity it displays the Indian economy influence instantly. The aim of this revise is to check the relationship between Foreign Portfolio Investment (FPI) and select macroeconomic Indicators in India.

Industrial interdependence: China 1995–2010

ABSTRACTThe present article focuses on inter-industrial activity via a useful decomposition of the input-output model and deals with the changes of domestic industrial/sectoral backward and forward linkages (i.e. the pull and push of the economy) as well as the changes in their domestic and imported components (i.e. via import substitution/penetration) over the 1995–2010 period. There are three distinctive periods of import substitution/import penetration, which seem to correspond to the East-Asian crisis of 1997 and the global crisis of 2008 as well as the main reform and policies of the periods. The secondary and tertiary sectors show a positive increase in both the pull of backward linkages and the push of forward linkages, showing important levels of absolute import substitution. This is especially true for the pull of light and heavy industry on the economy and secondarily for domestic trade, heavy industry becoming the main engine of the economy by far.

Internal capital market practices of multinational banks evidence from south africa

This paper examines how internal capital flows inside multinational banks create global financial interconnections, relying on a novel database on foreign banks operating in South Africa. Using the event of the East Asian crisis, I find that foreign affiliates’ balance sheet face “reversal of fortune” when other members of their banking group need large amounts of internal capital to cushion capital losses, leading to an abrupt reallocation of internal capital across countries. At the same time, an increase of the volume of internal funding received is shown to cause an expansion of credit to the local private sector.

Global Shocks and the Growth Constraints in the Malaysian Economy 1970-2012

A structural dynamic model is developed to assess Malaysia’s external and internal constraints prior to the East Asian crisis. The model computes the resource requirement to move the economy to a more sustainable form of development. In addition, we examine how the 2008 global financial crisis affected economic performance. The calibrated results clearly show the trade-off between the rate of investment and economic growth under the fiscal and foreign exchange constraints. Our results also highlight the importance of the external trade and FDI to achieve a modest growth.

Role of Social Security in Explaining the Rate of Saving Disparity: A Historical Study of New Zealand versus Singapore: 1960-1993

This paper provides evidence to argue that the difference in the social security schemes of two countries may help explain the disparity in their saving rates. We examine the argument by limiting our focus to a comparison of New Zealand and Singapore for the period 1960–1993. We choose the period to avoid the potential impact of the major restructuring of the New Zealand Superannuation since 1994 toward a partially funded system and the East Asia crisis of the late 1990s. In New Zealand, the unfunded system of provision of social security has the effect of reducing the private saving rate. In Singapore, on the other hand, due to the fully-funded nature of the Central Provident Fund (CPF), an increase in CPF saving will increase overall private and gross national saving, with some leakage into consumption. Also, since future social security wealth is directly related to current saving, Singaporeans have more incentives to transfer a higher fraction of the increase in current income for future retirement purposes. For New Zealanders, prior to 1994, the unfunded system did not accord the individuals that same control, because under their old system they could not increase future social security wealth by transferring current resources to the future. Through an empirical exercise, we discover that reasonable differences in thriftiness alone cannot explain the observed disparity in the rate of saving while the estimated differences in the impact of social security on saving provide a sufficient explanation.

Balance sheet effects on monetary and financial spillovers: The East Asian crisis plus 20

We study how the financial conditions in the Center Economies [the U.S., Japan, and the Euro area] impact other countries over the period 1986 through 2015. Our methodology relies upon a two-step approach. We focus on five possible linkages between the center economies (CEs) and the non-Center economics, or peripheral economies (PHs), and investigate the strength of these linkages. For each of the five linkages, we first regress a financial variable of the PHs on financial variables of the CEs while controlling for global factors. Next, we examine the determinants of sensitivity to the CEs as a function of country-specific macroeconomic conditions and policies, including the exchange rate regime, currency weights, monetary, trade and financial linkages with the CEs, the levels of institutional development, and international reserves. Extending our previous work (Aizenman et al., 2016), we devote special attention to the impact of currency weights in the implicit currency basket, balance sheet exposure, and currency composition of external debt. We find that for both policy interest rates and the real exchange rate (REER), the link with the CEs has been pervasive for developing and emerging market economies in the last two decades, although the movements of policy interest rates are found to be more sensitive to global financial shocks around the time of the emerging markets’ crises in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and since 2008. When we estimate the determinants of the extent of connectivity, we find evidence that the weights of major currencies, external debt, and currency compositions of debt are significant factors. More specifically, having a higher weight on the dollar (or the euro) makes the response of a financial variable such as the REER and exchange market pressure in the PHs more sensitive to a change in key variables in the U.S. (or the euro area) such as policy interest rates and the REER. While having more exposure to external debt would have similar impacts on the financial linkages between the CEs and the PHs, the currency composition of international debt securities does matter. Economies more reliant on dollar-denominated debt issuance tend to be more vulnerable to shocks emanating from the U.S.

Do Employers' Responses to Crises Impact Men and Women Differently? Firm‐level Evidence from Indonesia

AbstractDo employers' responses to crises impact men and women differently? Using manufacturing census data from Indonesia this paper assesses gender differences in the impact of the East Asian crisis and to what extent these were due to differential treatment of men and women within firms and gender sorting across firms that varied in their exposure to the crisis. On average, women experienced higher job losses than their male colleagues within the same firm. However, the aggregate adverse effect of such differential treatment was more than offset by women being disproportionately employed in firms hit relatively less hard by the crisis. The null hypothesis that there were no gender differences in wage adjustment is not rejected.

Capital controls or macroprudential regulation?

International capital flows can create significant financial instability in emerging economies. Does this make it optimal to impose capital controls or should policymakers rely on domestic macroprudential regulation in their quest for greater financial stability? This paper shows that it is desirable to employ both instruments to mitigate contractionary exchange rate depreciations: Macroprudential regulation reduces the amount and riskiness of financial liabilities, no matter whether they are financed by domestic or foreign lenders; capital controls increase the aggregate net worth of the economy by reducing net inflows. Both types of policy measures make the economy more stable and reduce the incidence and severity of crises. They should be set higher the greater an economy's debt burden and the higher domestic inequality. In a calibration based on the East Asian crisis countries, we find that it is optimal to impose both capital controls and macroprudential regulation that amount to a 2% tax on debt flows or equivalent quantity regulations. In advanced countries where the risk of contractionary exchange rate depreciations is more limited, the role for capital controls subsides. However, macroprudential regulation remains essential to mitigate booms and busts in asset prices.

Prospects and Challenges of Intraregional Trade and Investment among India and BIMSTEC

The globalisation wave gave rise to a number of regional arrangements. The thought of economic regionalism expanded the prominence in international trade as well as regional diplomacy. In present world, no nations survive into economic isolation. So, Trade liberalisation alone is notadequate condition for nations to turn either single or multiple “Regional Integration Arrangements” (RIA). Within such arrangements. Desire is to assist neighbouring states for mutually beneficial purposes, as well as to take anticipatory action against the spill over of unrest and mass economic migration. The fascinating logic of regional groupings in Asia, coupled with the obvious failure of SAARC and the near incapacitating East Asian crisis of 1997, jointly contributed to the creation of BIMSTEC. The BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation) grouping, brainchild of Thailand, is a unique initiative in sub regional economic cooperation. It has the distinction of combining five geographically contiguous countries of SAARC with two of ASEAN, thus creating a vast scope for regional development. BIMSTEC is a relatively young organization among the various regional and sub-regional grouping in Asia. This paper investigate growth of Intra-regional trade and investment among India and BIMSTEC nations and their prospects and challenges. Time series data has been used to calculate intra-regional trade with Intra Industry Trade (IIT) index and econometric model i.e. ARIMA (Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average) has been used for analysing prospects of trade and investment. The group demonstrate that there is momentous progress to expand the intra-bloc trade and investment with preferential liberalisation within the regional arrangement.

Bayesian Analysis of Structural Changes in a Linear Regression Model: An Application to Rupee-Dollar Exchange Rate

The objective of this paper is to find the points of structural shift in the exchange rate model under a Bayesian framework which incorporates the possibility of shift or no shift in both disturbances precision and regression parameter. The Bayesian analysis of a linear regression model has been carried out under the mixture of prior distributions for the parameters. In order to find the structural shift points, a test based on posterior odds ratio for testing the hypothesis of no structural shift against the alternative hypothesis of shift due to change in disturbances precision and regression parameters has been developed. Further, to illustrate the theoretical findings, the effect of interest rate, growth rate of trade balance and GDP growth rate (market price) on Indian rupee-US dollar exchange rate has been investigated. The application of proposed model indicates that the strongest structural shift of exchange rate captured in the years 1997–1998 and 2007–2008. The stability in the foreign exchange market was disrupted during 1997–1998 and 2007–2008 due to intensification of East Asian crises and global financial crisis respectively.

State Dependence and Stickiness of Sovereign Credit Ratings: Evidence from a Panel of Countries

SummaryUsing data from Moody's, we examine three sources of sovereign credit ratings persistence: true state dependence, spurious state dependence and serial error correlation. Accounting for ratings persistence, we also examine whether ratings were sticky or procyclical for two major crises: the European debt crisis and the East Asian crisis. We set up a dynamic panel ordered probit model with autocorrelated disturbances and nonparametrically distributed random effects. An efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm is designed for model estimation. We find evidence of stickiness of ratings and of the three sources of ratings persistence, with the true state dependence being weak. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

East Asian Business Networks and Crisis Performance

Do political ties, family-business group affiliation, and professional connections collectively matter for firm performance? By exploiting a new dataset for 1,290 large East Asian firms during the 2008 financial crisis, we offer a holistic comparison of these different networks. We find that professional networks buoyed performance; political and family networks did not. This suggests information access is a key benefit of business networks. A one standard deviation improvement to a firm's professional network position cushioned quarterly ROA by 2/5 of a percentage point during the crisis.

Capital Controls or Macroprudential Regulation?

International capital flows can create significant financial instability in emerging economies because of pecuniary externalities associated with exchange rate movements. Does this make it optimal to impose capital controls or should policymakers rely on domestic macroprudential regulation? This paper presents a tractable model to show that it is desirable to employ both types of instruments: Macroprudential regulation reduces overborrowing, while capital controls increase the aggregate net worth of the economy as a whole by also stimulating savings. The two policy measures should be set higher the greater an economy's debt burden and the higher domestic inequality. In our baseline calibration based on the East Asian crisis countries, we find optimal capital controls and macroprudential regulation in the magnitude of 2 percent. In advanced countries where the risk of sharp exchange rate depreciations is more limited, the role for capital controls subsides. However, macroprudential regulation remains essential to mitigate booms and busts in asset prices.

Studying Crisis through Structural Breaks: A Retrospective on Asian Currency Crisis

The financial crises that have happened during the past few years give us an opportunity to think in retrospect about crisis. The objective of this paper is to identify and analyse various indicators which were affected by the East Asia crisis. The methodology employed is more scientific and systematic and studies structural breaks, before, during and after the crisis. Dummy variables have been used for both A5 countries and India which enabled inter-temporal and international comparisons of crisis variables. The variables do not show the same trend in case of all the crisis-hit countries. In India, none of the variables show structural break indicating that India was not hit by the crisis.