Since the 1980s, emerging countries have been urged to welcome foreign capital inflows. The result has often been a pattern of surges, where excessive inflows were followed by damaging "sudden stops" and reversals. This was dramatically evident in the Asian crisis of 1997 - 1998. Since that...

The Impossible Trinity doctrine still holds a powerful sway over policymakers, advisors (particularly the International Monetary Fund [IMF]) and academia. In East Asia over the past decade, however, most countries have been able to maintain open capital markets, monetary policy independence, and...

Pegging in a coordinated way to a regional basket currency is considered by many as optimal for east-Asian countries. By contrast, according to existing empirical studies, these countries have most often relied on noncooperative United States dollar or G3 pegs. We show for the first time that by...

The “decoupling” of East Asia from its economic interactions – both in trade and finance – with the rest of the world refers to the phenomenon of a weakening of the impact of demand and supply shocks emanating from the advanced countries on the region's economic performance since the...

This paper seeks to add to the current debate about financial development and growth in the emerging world by looking at how different financial systems evolve: how and why financial structures change during various stages of development, how best to measure them, and seeing what practical...