East Asian economies and financial globalisation in the post-crisis world

In the aftermath of the Asian financial crises in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, many Asian emerging market economies started rapidly increasing their international reserve holdings. This column assesses the East Asian economies’ openness to cross-border capital flows and exchange rate arrangements over the past decades. Financial globalisation has made asset prices and interest rates in these economies more vulnerable to global movements of capital, and to US monetary policy. If China succeeds in efforts to internationalise its currency, the dynamics between the US and Asia will most likely change. For now, however, the Asian region’s international finance continues to be dollar-centric.