This study examines the case for and against regional financial arrangements in East Asia, describes the Chiang Mai Initiative, compares it to financial arrangements in other regions. It speaks specifically to the concerns of American, European and multilateral organizations, assessing the pros and cons for the global system of such regional financial arrangements.

Since the Asian financial crisis of 1997?1998, there has been a deep and abiding desire on the part of Asian policy makers and opinion makers to enhance the region's economic, monetary and financial self-sufficiency ? or at least to ring-fence the region against financial instability and give it a louder voice in global financial affairs. There has been progress in these directions, notably in the form of the Chiang Mai Initiative of financial supports and the Asian Bond Market Initiative to build a single Asian financial market. But progress is hindered by disagreements among the principal national governments ? Japan, China and South Korea ? and resistance to the development of an Asian bloc from both Europe and the United States.This volume considers these issues from a number of different national and analytical perspectives. Scholars from all the relevant regions and countries are represented: Japan, China, Korea, Europe and the United States. The treatments are rigorous, but nontechnical and accessible. While there have been a few previous books and articles concerned with the issue of Asian integration, this is one of the first volumes to successfully draw together top contributors from these different countries and regions to address the issues in a rigorous but relatively accessible way.

"This paper argues that a regional financial architecture needs to be firmly established in East Asia, outlines recent developments in financial cooperation in the region, and provides possible directions for the future". -- p. 1.

The book intents to locate the process and effectiveness of cooperation in East Asia, to regard the construction of the East Asian community as the ideal, to see the contradictions and difficulties in construction as the reality, and to identify the actual development and achievement as the choice and effort between the two. The year of 1997 saw the Asian financial crisis, which turned out to be a disaster but also opened up an opportunity for East Asia to establish cooperation mechanisms. Starting with the crisis, this book examines the origin and development of the East Asian cooperation movement. More importantly, it investigates the obstacles and resistance, and provides insights into the cooperation within East Asia in the context of unstable political environments. Specifically, it expounds the East Asian Free Trade Area, monetary cooperation, as well as the cooperation within Northeast Asian and Asia-Pacific regions.

East Asia enjoyed a role as a growth center of the world economy from the 1960s until the currency and economic crisis of 1997. In 1993, the World Bank issued a report entitled "The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy," in which the bank expressed its admiration for the region 's rapid economic develop ment. However, within only four years the region had fallen prey to the currency and economic crisis that spread outward from Thailand. In the midst of the crisis, many East Asian countries began at long last to cooperate with one another in order to cope with these unprecedented difficulties and to prevent another crisis. In fact, the East Asian region was an exception throughout the 1990s with re spect to regionalism. A surge of regionalism, which began in Europe in the second half ofthe 1980s, spread to North America and Latin America. However, the North east Asian region in particular, consisting of Japan, China (People's Republic of China), and Korea (Republic of Korea), did not participate in any kind of regional economic arrangements. Regional cooperation frameworks were limited to coun tries belonging to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and did not spread to the Northeast Asian region.

This edited volume evaluates the prospects for monetary and financial cooperation in East Asia after the crises in the developed countries (2008 in the US, 2010 in Europe).

Since the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98, East Asian economies have sought to make themselves less vulnerable to global financial markets by transforming the regional financial architecture. With Japan as a leading actor, they have introduced initiatives to provide emergency financing to crisis economies, support the development of local-currency bond markets, and better coordinate currency policies. In Currency and Contest in East Asia, William W. Grimes builds on years of primary research and scores of interviews with participants and policy analysts to provide the most accurate, complete, and detailed description available of attempts to build financial cooperation among East Asian countries. Adapting realist political economy theory to the realities of contemporary global finance, Grimes places regional issues firmly in the wider context of great-power rivalries. He argues that financial regionalism can best be understood as one arena for competition among Japan, the United States, and China. Despite their mutual desire for regional prosperity and economic stability, these three powers have conflicting political interests. Their struggles for regional leadership raise questions about the long-term feasibility of regional financial cooperation, the possible effects of Sino-Japanese rivalry on regional financial stability, and the potential for East Asian financial regionalism to undermine the long-established-albeit waning-global and regional dominance of the United States and the dollar.