This article analyzes five significant institutional variables related to membership and control of institutions, using comparative case studies of Asia's past regional financial projects from the 1950s through the 1990s. The five variables are: (i) countries included in or excluded from membership, (ii) membership tiers, (iii) institutional decision-making process, (iv) executive positions at ...

Understanding the determinants of capital inflows is essential to designing an effective policy framework to manage volatile capital flows and their disruptive potential. This paper aims to identify factors that explain the size and volatility of various types of capital flows to developing Asia, vis-à-vis other emerging market economies. The estimates for a panel dataset show that per capita income ...

Regionalism in East Asia by Richard Pomfret is a relatively short and readable book, but it provides readers with useful insights on the past, current and future of East Asian regionalism to outline the prospects of future regionalism. While this is not a book on contemporary economic history of Asia, as he notes, the historical perspective is critical to analysing relatively 'recent' phenomena of ...

In this paper we examine the role of investment promotion agencies (IPA) in promoting outward foreign direct investment (FDI) from Japan and Korea. Looking at two home countries enables us to control for both country-pair time-invariant characteristics and host-country time-varying characteristics. Our empirical results suggest that home-country IPA tend to be more effective in promoting outward FDI ...

Many economists maintain that in order to advance economic growth Asian countries should focus more on basic research than on technology adoption, and more on the supply of skilled workers than the supply of unskilled workers. In this context, this paper presents a theoretical model and empirical evidence to explain the observation that a country in which the level of technology approaches the ...

In the first phase of the global financial crisis, rising inflation was a major concern for emerging East Asian central banks. Coupled with a slowing US economy, regional central banks faced a monetary policy dilemma of either addressing higher inflation or supporting moderate growth. Higher food and fuel prices were the major drivers of headline inflation. Their causes, however, were a confluence ...

There are four major modes through which firms undertake foreign direct investment (FDI) – merger and acquisition (M&A), joint venture (JV), new plant (NP) and others (O). The four modes of FDI are distinct from each other, and each has its own unique advantages and disadvantages. While a large and growing empirical literature examines the determinants of FDI, very few studies examine the determinants ...

We investigate the relationship between economic growth and lagged international capital flows, disaggregated into FDI, portfolio investment, equity investment, and short-term debt. We follow about 100 countries during 1990–2010 when emerging markets became more integrated into the international financial system. We look at the relationship both before and after the global crisis. Our study reveals ...

Firms in export-oriented sectors with more exporters and more foreign investment, or firms with more access/use of credit, tend to export a higher share of their output, whether they are small or large. The latter points out that the benefits of size-neutral policies that improve the overall business and foreign investment climate and secure access to formal credit for all enterprises produce benefits ...

In the present paper, we investigate whether capital flows induce domestic asset price hikes in the case of Korea. This issue is relevant for crisis-hit economies trying to prevent a boom–bust cycle as well as in the formulation of macroeconomic policy objectives in emerging market economies. Korea has recently experienced large capital inflows, in particular a surge in portfolio inflows. Furthermore, ...