The United States and China are at a turning point in their investment relationship. China’s previous investments in the US were predominantly in government securities, while other holdings were negligible. Recently, the accumulation of treasury securities has slowed and direct...

Monetary policy is the process by which the central bank of a country controls the supply of money, the availability of money, and the cost of money or rate of interest, in order to attain a set of objectives oriented towards the growth and stability of the economy. Fiscal policy induced demand...

The Asian financial crisis increased economic disparities in the East Asian region, thus making monetary integration more difficult, but rekindled political interest in Asian monetary and exchange rate cooperation. This paper applies the theory of Generalized Purchasing Power Parity (G-PPP),...

The objective of this paper is see how well Singapores exchange rate regime has coped with exchange rate volatility before and after the Asian financial crisis by comparing the performance of Singapores actual regime in minimising the volatility of the nominal effective exchange rate (NEER) and...

This paper considers how a regional currency basket and the associated divergence indicators could be used in official surveillance. Recently, proponents of Asian currency baskets have referred to the role the ECU played in constructing exchange rate divergence indicators in Europe as evidence...

As the countries in East Asia embark on financial liberalization, a key issue that confronts policymakers is the greater complexity of risks that is injected into the financial system. In particular, capital account liberalization may potentially increase the vulnerability of individual...

During the past five years or so, most East Asian economies including the Philippines experienced a rising level of foreign exchange reserves and rapidly appreciating currencies both in nominal and real terms. One cause has been the resurgence of capital flows, which makes the issue of how to...

There are plans by five West African countries to establish a second monetary zone in the sub-region by December 2009. In this paper we ask whether a monetary union is the appropriate exchange rate regime for the sub-region based on economic criteria. We address the issue using a rigorous...

This paper estimated the pass-through effects of yuans exchange rates on prices of the US and Japanese imports from the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). Empirical results show that, a 1% nominal appreciation of the yuan would result in a 0.23% increase in prices of the US imports in the short...

This paper argues that calls for a New Bretton Woods system in the aftermath of the global economic crisis—similar to the remarkable 1944 Bretton Woods conference that led to the establishment of various international economic institutions—are unlikely to be answered. The likely...