The rise of regional monetary arrangements poses a challenge for the International Monetary Fund (IMF)'s global surveillance efforts. This paper reviews how the IMF has responded to earlier regional initiatives, from the European Payments Union of the 1950s and the Gold Pool of the 1960s to the...

Current account deficits in the United States (US) and current account surpluses in East Asia are an enduring part of the global economic landscape. They are supported by low saving in the US and by reserve accumulation in Asia. This paper argues that this strategy is causing macroeconomic...

Compared with China's dominance in world trade, its expanding role in global finance is poorly documented and understood. Over the past decades, China has exported record amounts of capital to the rest of the world. Many of these financial flows are not reported to the IMF, the BIS or the World...

China's lending boom to developing countries is morphing into defaults and debt distress. Given the secrecy surrounding China's loans, also the associated defaults remain 'hidden', as missed payments and restructuring details are not disclosed. We construct an encompassing dataset of sovereign...

This paper shows that China has launched a new global system for cross-border rescue lending to countries in debt distress. We build the first comprehensive dataset on China's overseas bailouts between 2000 and 2021 and provide new insights into China's growing role in the global financial...

This paper discusses the Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization (CMIM); its origin, development and future outlook. It puts forward a number of proposals to make the liquidity support role of the CMIM more effective. It is further argued that the CMIM can bring about major changes to the...

This paper analyzes the role and scope of macroprudential policy in preventing financial instability in the context of East Asian economies. It analyzes the behavior of the housing market in a dynamic setting to identify some of the factors responsible for the volatility of housing markets and...

In this paper we analyze the effects of external shocks on countries in Emerging Asia. For that purpose, we estimate a Bayesian Vector Auto-Regressive model (BVAR) with an informative prior on the steady state, including variables representing world economic activity, financial conditions,...

This paper describes the Chinese economic and institutional reform process as a gradual transition of an informal, relation-based governance system into a more formal and rule-based governance system. The consequences of macro-level institutional reforms on the importance of personal...

Based on the variable rate of gross domestic product per capita growth and its sources, this paper first identifies five phases of economic development that are common to China, Japan, and Korea: M (Malthusian), G (government-led), K (à la Kuznets), H (human capital based) and PD (post...