Exchange Rates Under the East Asian Dollar Standard

Unlike those who have made themselves into improvised Asia pundits overnight, Ronald McKinnon has a longstanding record of research on Asian economies, to which this book offers only his most recent contributions. Distancing himself from conventional economic thinking on Asian monetary and exchange rate policies, McKinnon develops an original conceptual framework highlighting the challenges that confront Asian policy makers today. His analysis is clearly presented and the interactions among East Asian economies carefully documented in an effort to advance a theory that might be validly applied to the economies of other emerging regions of the world. China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand have experienced rapid export‐driven growth in recent decades. Although they once traded largely with countries outside the region, these seemingly disparate nations have increasingly strengthened their economic ties over time: not only does East Asia’s intraregional trade now equal its international trade, but East Asian economies also share the foreign exchange risk that arises from their use of an outside currency – the US dollar – in international transactions. The choice of the US dollar as the key currency even for most intraregional trade, coupled with the presence of incomplete domestic financial markets, underpins what McKinnon calls the ‘East Asian dollar standard’. Because East Asian countries cannot borrow internationally in their own currencies (the so‐called ‘original sin’) and forward markets in foreign exchange are expensive or poorly developed, their governments have stepped in, stabilising the national currencies against the dollar as a way of providing an informal forward hedge

China · Currency · Development economics · East Asia · Economics · Economy · Exchange rate · Foreign exchange risk · International economics · International trade · Liberian dollar · Monetary economics · Political science · Reserve currency · Special drawing rights · Finance · Global Financial Crisis and Policies