With globalization, market liberalization, and the rapid development of rural infrastructure, new market opportunities for high-value crops and livestock production are expanding in both developed and developing countries. This has translated into increased use of contract farming to establish market linkages for the poor in developing countries. In poor areas where smallholder subsistence production ...

This paper reviews policies taken to address capital flows in Malaysia from 1999 to 2007. In the face of increasingly volatile capital flows and their repercussions on the domestic economy, the monetary authority needs to pursue active monitoring and intervention. Moreover, having a resilient financial sector with prudential regulations may help overcome the negative effects of capital reversal. ...

This paper examines financing mechanisms to support infrastructure development and connectivity in Northeast Asia—comprising the Northeastern People’s Republic of China, Japan, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), the Republic of Korea, Mongolia, and the Russian Far East. Although this subregion has developed the Greater Tumen Initiative, the extent of intergovernmental cooperation for ...

We investigate the determinants of currency choice for trade invoicing in a cross-country context while focusing on the link between capital account liberalization and its impact on the use of the renminbi (RMB). We find that while countries with more developed financial markets tend to invoice less in the US dollar, countries with more open capital accounts tend to invoice in either the euro or ...

The possible crucial role of international bank lending in transmitting adverse economic disturbance from developed economies to emerging economies in the 2008–2009 global financial crisis has placed capital flows into sharper scrutiny in academic and policy discussions. The authors construct macro-and micro-panel data on international bank lending to six Asian economies—Indonesia, the Republic of ...

"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 CFA franc zone and the European Monetary System. The penultimate section draws out the implications for ...

"Pension assets have seen rapid growth world-wide over the past decades, although they suffered large losses during the global financial crisis of 2007–2008. Such growth is notably due to both structural and parametric pension reforms since the 1980s. In the Asian region too, the pension market has steadily expanded. This paper seeks to identify the impact of Asian pension funds on selected key ...

This paper analyzes the optimal transition of the exchange rate regime in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). How the PRC can successfully reach the desired regime—whether a basket peg or floating regime—from the current dollar-peg regime remains a major question. To answer it, we develop a dynamic small open-economy general equilibrium model. We construct four transition policies toward the ...

This paper discusses what is longevity risk, why it is important, approaches used by the West to manage longevity risk and what lessons can be learnt by Asian countries from the experiences of the West. Increasing and uncertain longevity has emerged as a key risk affecting individuals, pension plans, insurers and governments in both the developed and emerging world. I discuss progress in the field ...

As the countries of Europe have successfully managed to move the region’s integration forward step by step, the European experience offers three possible models for regional integration with different depths: a free trade arrangement, a single market, and a common currency area. In this paper, we examine the effect of these three different models of regional integration on total factor productivity ...