Developing Asian Bondmarkets. Edited by Takatoshi Ito and Yung Chul Park. Canberra: Pacific Press at the Australian National University, 2004. Pp. 178. This edited volume is the outcome of the 2003 Financial Forum organized by the Pacific Economic Co-operation Council in Thailand. The nine contributors are financial experts/academics from Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, and the United States. This book is an attempt to delve into developing bondmarkets in region after the 1997-98 financial crisis. The editors expect the research output of this book to get the attention of policy-makers in ASEAN+3 and other APEC governments. The volume consists of an introduction and six individual chapters. Chapter 1 Overview: Challenges and Strategies is written by the editors. It offers a quick overview of bondmarkets in and the significance of the Asian bondmarket development. The editors stress that the policy-makers in the region have recognized the importance of bondmarkets in mitigating future currency crises but concrete actions are yet to be taken. In this chapter, readers will get a good bird's-eye view of the rest of the book. The editors deserve special credit for providing a useful outline of the various contributions and attempting to bring together a diverse collection of interesting conference papers. In the next two chapters, the contributors propose two differently comprehensive approaches for Asian bondmarket development. Chapter 2 Creating Regional Bondmarkets in East Asia contains the rationale and strategies for creating regional bondmarkets in East Asia. The contributors point out that domestic bondmarket development should precede regional bondmarket development. If domestic bondmarkets are fortified by domestic financial infrastructure, deregulated, and opened to foreign borrowers and investors, many Asian countries would be able to mitigate the maturity and currency mismatch problems caused by the 1997-98 Asian crisis. The contributors also recommend that the Asian bondmarket development should begin with improving bondmarket infrastructure and removing institutional bottlenecks. In this chapter, Asian bonds have been too broadly defined, and it is not clear what are not Asian bonds. The proposed strategies for creating regional bondmarkets are convincing from the investors' perspective, but not from bond issuers' or borrowers' perspective. Discussion on region bias in portfolio preferences is informative and worth a read. Literature reviews on Asian bonds and Asian bondmarkets are interesting and help readers to understand what is going on in the regional financial integration. Chapter 3 Promoting Asian Basket Currency Bonds proposes to establish an Asian Bond Corporation (ABC) to purchase local currency bonds and transform them into a basket currency bond, namely ABC bonds. The contributor also commented that the Asian Bond Fund (ABF) proposed in 2003 was a good step towards an eventual development of the Asian bondmarket, but the U.S.-dollar denominated Asian bonds could not solve the double mismatch problem. Moreover, channelling funds to corporations could not be achieved. In this chapter, issues surrounding Asian bondmarket development (e.g., home bias, role of government, currency risk diversification) have been proposed in a distinguishable manner, different from that in Chapter 2. The objectives of ABC bonds and the ABC are also clearly defined. …