The role of regional financial arrangements and monetary integration in East Asia and Europe in relations with the United States

Abstract

Regional financial arrangements and monetary integration in East Asia and Europe have made considerable progress in recent years. This paper discusses whether governments in both regions, Japan and Germany as the most advanced regional economies in particular, can use the new dynamics as levers to raise their status vis-à-vis the United States. It will be argued that activities are defensive rather than offensive, aiming at protecting the respective region from financial risk. Japan, in particular, would find it difficult to raise its status vis-à-vis the United States significantly by promoting regional financial and monetary integration, principal reasons being actor heterogeneity, the role of China, hesitation to bear burden and risk, and the historical legacy of a bank-oriented system.

Keywords:

• keywords Regional financial and monetary integration
• East Asia
• Japan
• Europe
• Germany
• United States

Acknowledgements

Stimulating comments from Warwick workshop organizers, participants, Heribert Dieter, an anonymous referee as well as support from Norifumi Kawai are gratefully acknowledged.

Werner Pascha is Professor of East Asian Economic Studies at the Institute of East Asian Studies and at the Department of Business Studies of Duisburg-Essen-University, Germany. In addition, he is chair of the Advisory Council on Japan and Korea of the German Association for Asian Studies and has frequently worked in East Asia as a visiting scholar, including Kobe University (2006) and the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (2007). He is interested in the structural/institutional changes of the Japanese and Korean economies as well as international economic relations in Pacific-Asia. Recent publications include: ‘On the potentials of interregional policy co-operation – the case of Europe's participation in the Asian Development Bank’, in J. Rüland et al. (eds) Asian–European Relations: Building Blocks for Global Governance?, London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2007, and ‘New options for Northeast Asian cooperation in development finance, Journal of East Asian Affairs, 2007 (forthcoming).

Notes

Notes

1. See the even more pointed arguments in Rhee (2004), who speaks of ‘Japan's ambiguous and burden-avoiding attitude’.

2. Based on interviews by the author in Tokyo, May 2006.

3. Arguments are usually based on whether the region approaches the conditions of an optimal currency area. For an application of this concept to Asia see Mundell (2003).

4. See Goto (2002) and Kawai (2005); for a more sceptical view see Zhang et al. (2004). For recent contributions see the special issue on East Asian financial architecture of the MoF's Fainansharu Rebyû 83, May 2006.

5. See Choudry et al. (2000) for a technical analysis that there is such evidence already for data up to 1995.

6. Eichengreen (2003: 30) quotes an unpublished MoF paper of 2002 in this context, authored by Haruhiko Kuroda, the current ADB president, and Masahiro Kawai, an influential academic close to the ministry.

7. For contributions see Goto (2002) and Ito (2002).