Global Imbalances and East Asian Currencies

Were East Asian Currencies Overvalued?

Hobson’s voice: American internationalism, Asian development, and global macroeconomic imbalances

John Hobson’s theory of Imperialism has remarkable relevance for contemporary relations between the United States and Asia/Europe. A reconstruction of his argument shows that whereas the Bretton Woods period presents Hobson’s preferred non-imperial outcome, this outcome was not stable. Instead, the dynamics that brought about Imperialism in the first place eroded Bretton Woods and returned us t...

Global Imbalances and Financial Fragility

The U.S. is currently engulfed in the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression. A key structural factor behind this crisis is the large demand for riskless assets from the rest of the world. In this paper we present a model to show how such demand not only triggered a sharp rise in U.S. asset prices, but also exposed the U.S. financial sector to a downturn by concentrating risk o...

Trade Arrangements and Evolving East Asian and Asia Pacific

The paper begins by noting that proposals involving significant developments in the regional tradearchitecture are being developed within regional processes that in some cases are simultaneouslypursuing other dimensions of regional economic integration: monetary and financial cooperation inthe case of ASEAN + 3, and the establishment of a common market in the case of ASEAN. At leastthree of the...

East Asian Production Networks – The Role and Contribution of SMEs

The Asia-Pacific region generates over half of global economic activity (54.2%) and about 43.7% of global trade, and is the most dynamic region in the global economy. At the core of this is an increasingly dynamic, vibrant and entrepreneurial small-medium sized enterprise sector. Advances in information and communications technology, market liberalisation and moves towards closer regional econo...