Cyn-Young Park

Global Financial Turmoil: Impact and Challenges for Asia's Financial Systems

This paper examines the unfolding of the U.S. sub-prime-generated turmoil and its potential spillover effects on Asias emerging financial systems. The sub-prime mortgage mess has revealed key structural weaknesses in the evolution of modern credit markets. Although emerging Asian financial markets have suffered only limited impact thus far, they remain open to further contagion given underlying weaknesses in the regions financial systems. Rapid financial globalization also poses new challenges as the regions largely unsophisticated banking and financial systems strive to keep up with the evolving financial environment. Policy priorities to foster regional financial stability include enhancing transparency and governance, improving risk management, strengthening regulation and supervision, and deepening and broadening financial systems, especially by developing local currency bond markets.

Asia's contribution to global rebalancing

Developing Asia remains at the core of global payment imbalances. While the geographical concentration of current account imbalances is rather significant, with the People’s Republic of China accounting for the lion’s share of the region’s current account surplus, how Asia contributes to global rebalancing also depends critically on the NIEs and larger ASEAN economies. Given the region’s huge diversity, the necessary national macroeconomic and structural policies will vary significantly across Asia’s emerging economies. Whereas near-term rebalancing efforts will be driven primarily by macroeconomic and exchange rate policies, medium- to long-term measures will involve policies and structural reforms directed to boost domestic and regional demand as a source of economic growth. In this paper, we argue that regional rebalancing will depend critically on the adoption of deeper and more comprehensive structural reforms and further trade liberalization that promote domestic spending—thus reducing Asia’s high dependence on extra regional demand. Priority policies should include infrastructure spending, competition, trade, financial development, investment, immigration, and other social policies to reduce national savings.

What Drives Different Types of Capital Flows and Their Volatilities in Developing Asia

Understanding the determinants of capital inflows is essential to designing an effective policy framework to manage volatile capital flows and their disruptive potential. This paper aims to identify factors that explain the size and volatility of various types of capital flows to developing Asia with regard to other emerging market economies. The estimates for a panel dataset show that per capita income growth, trade openness, and change in stock market capitalization are important determinants of capital inflows to developing Asia. Trade openness increases the volatility of all types of capital inflows, while change in stock market capitalization, global liquidity growth, and institutional quality lowers the volatility. A regional factor plays an important role in determining the size and volatility of capital inflows in emerging Europe and emerging Latin America, suggesting that regional economic cooperation and policy coordination may be an important element in designing a policy framework to manage capital inflows in emerging economies.

Financial Inclusion, Poverty, and Income Inequality in Developing Asia

Poverty and income inequality remain a stubborn challenge in Asia and the Pacific despite the region’s rapid economic expansion in previous decades, which lifted millions out of poverty. Financial inclusion is often considered as a critical element that makes growth inclusive as access to finance can enable economic agents to make longer-term consumption and investment decisions, participate in productive activities, and cope with unexpected short-term shocks. Understanding the link between financial inclusion, poverty, and income inequality at the country level will help policymakers design and implement programs that will broaden access to financial services, leading to reduction of poverty incidence and income equality. This paper extends the existing literature on financial inclusion by focusing on developing Asian economies. We construct our own financial inclusion indicator to assess various macroeconomic and country-specific factors affecting the degree of financial inclusion for 37 selected developing Asian economies. We also test the impact of financial inclusion, along with other control variables, on poverty and income inequality. Our results show that per capita income, rule of law, and demographic characteristics significantly affect financial inclusion in developing Asia. Furthermore, we find that financial inclusion significantly reduces poverty; and there is also evidence that it lowers income inequality. Our findings suggest that the provisions for young and old-age populations, e.g., retirement pensions; and stronger rule of law, including enforcement of financial contracts and financial regulatory oversight, will broaden financial inclusion, thereby contributing to poverty reduction and lower income inequality.

Asian Capital Market Integration: Theory and Evidence

Financial integration is a multidimensional process through which allocation of financial assets becomes increasingly borderless. This paper assesses the progress achieved thus far in capital market integration in Asia, and compares regional capital market integration with global financial integration. The results of the analysis on which the paper is based indicate that while the pace of regional integration of financial markets in Asias emerging economies has accelerated in recent years, these markets remain more integrated with global financial markets than with other financial markets in the region. Further, integration of the regions domestic local-currency bond markets with their regional and global counterparts lags the pace of integration of its equity markets. The study also assesses the degree to which volatility in equity- and bond-market returns driven by financial turmoil originating at both the regional and global levels spills over into emerging Asia domestic equity and bond markets. The results of this analysis indicate that such spill-over significantly impacts both domestic equity and bond markets in the region. This finding suggests that ongoing regional capital market integration initiatives should take into account the risk of contagion that regional financial integration presents, and introduce measures for mitigating such risk as a means of ensuring financial stability in the region.

Asia's imprint on global commodity markets

Dynamic growth patterns of developing Asia will continue to make strong impressions in world commodity markets. Driven by rapid income growth and economic development, developing Asia has surfaced as a major demand force behind the price dynamics of primary commodities. The regions economic growth and development has been tightly associated with rapid industrialization, urbanization, and massive infrastructure investments, which are all resource‐intensive. These trends are set to intensify as Asias mammoth economies emerge. The paper provides an overview of Asian influence in world commodity markets and examines its changing patterns. It also attempts to quantify the impact of the rapidly growing Asian economy on long‐term resource utilization, using a General Equilibrium Model for Asian Trade to project regional growth scenarios. The model captures long‐run equilibrium tendencies in product and factor markets for the use of natural resources. The estimated results point to fundamental changes in market...

The Ties that Bind Asia, Europe, and United States

We investigate changes in Asia’s regional and global trade linkages and their influence on macroeconomic relationships among Asia, Europe, and United States (US). We first document changes in trade patterns of East Asia, Europe, and US and discuss stylized facts about East Asia’s trade structure. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) plays a critical role as an assembly and production center in rapidly expanding intra-Asian trade. However, the PRC’s trade share in parts and components with Europe and the US is rising, suggesting that the region’s production chains are increasingly integrated into the global business network. Empirical results from a panel vector auto-regression model generally confirm the positive effect of growing intra-Asian trade on both regional and global output comovements, reflecting the nature of intra-Asian trade that is heavily driven by external demand. However, macroeconomic interdependence among East Asia, Europe, and US is becoming more bidirectional, as shown by the positive effect of the East Asian aggregate output shock on both European and US outputs. The findings suggest a future role for Asia as an increasingly important trade partner and balancing power in the world economy.

Assessing Factors Affecting M&As Versus Greenfield FDI in Emerging Countries

A host of external (global and regional) and internal (country-specific) factors affect Multinational Enterprises’ Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) decisions. Differentiating the two entry modes of FDI (mergers and acquisitions [M&A] and Greenfield investment), this paper aims to empirically assess whether or not being a part of global emerging market economies or any specific emerging regions affects investors’ decisions of FDI flows to an emerging country in addition to various country-specific factors. For this purpose, this paper employs a system generalized method of moments estimator for the panel data consisting of 40 emerging countries for the period 1990–2009. The results suggest that there exist a strong and significant global and regional influence in both types of FDI flows to an emerging country. M&A appears to be more sensitive to external factors, both global and regional effects are about twice stronger for M&A than for Greenfield FDI. The results also suggest that country- specific factors matter a lot for FDI flows both in the form of M&A and Greenfield FDI, pointing to the importance of government roles in helping stabilize FDI flows to emerging countries. This paper also offers empirical evidence which is consistent with the phenomenon of a fire-sale FDI during the period of financial crisis. Additional evidence using extensive and intensive margins of M&A sales suggest that the fire-sale does not necessarily imply an increase in the number of deals, but it may reflect the sales of big firms during the crisis.

Does Financial Inclusion Reduce Poverty and Income Inequality in Developing Asia

Financial inclusion is a broad concept. As defined by Sarma (2008), financial inclusion is the process that ensures the ease of access, availability, and usage of the formal financial system for all members of an economy. The lack of access to the formal financial system (‘financial exclusion’) can be voluntary or involuntary. The World Bank (2014) defines voluntary exclusion as a condition where a segment of the population or of firms chooses not to use financial services either because they have no need for them or due to cultural or religious reasons. In contrast, involuntary exclusion arises from insufficient income and high risk profiles or from discrimination and market failures and imperfections. Policy and research initiatives must focus on involuntary exclusion, as it can be addressed by appropriate economic programs and policies designed to increase income levels and correct market failures and imperfections.

FINANCIAL INCLUSION, POVERTY, AND INCOME INEQUALITY

This paper extends the existing literature on financial inclusion by analyzing the factors affecting financial inclusion and assessing the impact of financial inclusion on poverty and income inequality in the world and Asia. We construct a new financial inclusion indicators to assess various macroeconomic and country-specific factors affecting the degree of financial inclusion for 176 economies, including 37 of which from developing Asia. We test the impact of financial inclusion, along with other control variables, on poverty and income inequality. We do so for full sample of countries and then for developing Asia sample to access which factors are relevant for full sample and for developing Asia specifically. The estimation results show that per capita income, rule of law, and demographic characteristics significantly affect financial inclusion for both world and Asia samples. However, primary education completion and literacy significantly increases financial inclusion only in the full sample, not for the Asian sample. The findings also indicate that financial inclusion is significantly correlated with lower poverty and income inequality levels for the full sample. For developing Asia, however, there appears to be no link between financial inclusion and income inequality.