Since the 1997 Asian currency crisis, new interest has emerged in the formation of a common currency area in East Asia. This paper provides estimates of trade and welfare effects of East Asian currency unions, using a micro-founded gravity model. Counter-factual experiments to assess the effects of various hypothetical currency arrangements for East Asia suggest that an East Asian currency union will double bilateral trade in the region, but the resulting welfare effects will be moderate. However, if Japan, a major trade partner for East Asia, is included in the union, welfare effects increase substantially. The evidence thus suggests that certain regional currency arrangements in East Asia will stimulate regional trade rigorously and can generate economically significant welfare gains.

Leading scholars from East Asia, Europe and the US contribute new insights to the key questions facing the organization and future of the monetary system in East Asia. Central questions discussed and analysed in the book include, amongst others: should the region move towards monetary union? Should countries peg their exchange rates to the US dollar? Is complete dollarization an option for East Asia? The authors argue that, having realized price stability over the last twenty years, in contrast to Latin America and Africa, the next logical step would be the gradual formation of various currency blocs within the region. This comprehensive discussion of the fundamental issues at stake will ensure the book's appeal to academics and researchers of Asian studies and financial economics. Financial experts working in this area and policymakers will also find much of interest to them within this book.

This book looks at East Asia's monetary and financial integration from both Asian and European perspectives. It analyses the Euro area's framework for monetary policy implementation, introduced in 1999. It reviews the efforts to foster regional monetary and financial integration and relates them to Europe's own evolution. It highlights successes and failures in both cases and offers a careful assessment of the state of play. A central theme of the volume is that the East Asian reliance on markets is not enough to promote the kind of deep integration that Europe has achieved and that provides protection against exchange rate turbulence. The implications of the recent global crisis are also examined. Written by two of the foremost monetary experts on Asia and Europe, this book will be an invaluable aid to students and academics interested in the relevance of the European experience to the debates about monetary integration in East Asia.

This book explores the opportunities and limits of currency cooperation in East Asia. Currency issues play an important role in the region. The Asian crisis of the late 90s was rooted in deficient currency arrangements. The Chinese RMB is not freely convertible yet, but policymakers in China nevertheless aim for a more international role of the Chinese currency. The recent change of direction in Japanese monetary policy caused a drastic depreciation of the Yen and led to warnings against a possible “currency war”, thus demonstrating that currency issues can also easily lead to political frictions. Most trade in and with the East Asian zone on the other hand is still conducted in US $. Against this background different modes of currency cooperation serve the goal of smoothing exchange rate fluctuations and capital flows. They are an important element to promote financial stability and to reduce the transaction cost for foreign trade or investment. The contributions of this book analyze the environment and design of currency cooperation in East Asia and their effects from a macro-and microeconomic viewpoint.

East Asian exchange rates have become a global flashpoint. U.S. policymakers blame artificially low Asian currency values for global imbalances, including America's ballooning current account deficit. The solution, they argue, lies in some combination of greater exchange rate flexibility and the appreciation of Asian currencies against the dollar. Asian officials recognize the need to let their exchange rates rise, but they fear that would hamper growth and cut sharply into the value of their dollar reserves. Toward an East Asian Exchange Rate Regime offers a timely and comprehensive analysis of the resulting debates, drawing on expertise from China, Japan, South Korea, and the United States. The introduction reviews the issues at stake, sketches a variety of proposed exchange rate regimes, and discusses comparisons between East Asia and the West. Subsequent chapters examine the connection between global financial imbalances and East Asian monetary cooperation, China's potential role in regional coordination, the relationship between monetary and trade integration, and different paths toward regional cooperation. Authoritative yet concise, this is an essential primer on East Asian monetary integration. Contributors include Gongpil Choi (Korean Institute of Finance, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco), Masahiro Kawai (University of Tokyo, Asian Development Bank), Kwanho Shin (Korea University), Yunjong Wang (SK Institute), Masaru Yoshitomi (RIETI,Tokyo), and Yongding Yu (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences).

Vertical fragmentation of product value chain across borders is the driving force of growing economic interdependency in East Asia. A common currency, not flexible exchange rates between national currencies, would reduce flexibility in relative prices within East Asia. Its impact would be far greater for exports that have stronger production network linkage. In order to test the hypothesis, the paper estimates the effect of a common currency on China's processing and ordinary exports separately. The distinction is necessary because the processing exports, unlike the ordinary exports, are produced along the regional production networks, with final stages of assembly and exporting being increasingly concentrated in China. The short-run dynamics indicate that the effect on China's processing exports is more than double the corresponding effect on China's ordinary exports. The long-run effect on the processing exports of intra-regional RER flexibility, which is otherwise the lack of a regional currency, is almost nine times as large as the long-run effect of a unilateral RMB appreciation. By contrast, the corresponding long-run effect is statistically insignificant for the case of ordinary exports that are produced primarily by using local inputs. The long-run coefficient of this intra-regional RER flexibility implies that the actual volume of processing exports is 20 percent below the potential. The magnitudes of these effects are consistent with the hypothesis that a common currency would further integrate East Asian production networks and promote regional economic integration.