Wednesday 8 July 2009

Asia's monetary integration - diffusion

Japan has just extended 16bn USD worth of currency swap to Indonesia, see here. There are two points of interest in this.
Firstly, this agreement falls outside the other smaller Bilateral Swap Agreements denominated in USD, thereby shoring up Japan's new trend of denominating its BSAs in yen.
Secondly, this agreement comes outside of the Chiang Mai Initiative (CMI).

In the context of the World Financial Crisis, the pressure for states to accept any BSA agreement which may bolster confidence in their economies and even help to fend off currency speculation is growing. For Japan, this WFC looks rather like the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) writ large, and provides another opportunity for Japan to try and cement its leadership in regional monetary affairs having failed to establish in 1998 the Asian Monetary Fund.

But by providing these new BSAs outside of the CMI, Japan is risking sidelining an organisation that, while still nascent, provides the best hope for Asian economic integration in the longer term. Of course, Japan's interest in seeing the CMI go ahead are well known, indeed it spearheaded the CMI. Thus, this move is puzzling. There are two main possible reasons why Japan might do so,
1/ Japan does not believe these BSAs affects the CMI, or that it is not significant (unlikely)
2/ In fact, Japan does not want the CMI to go ahead, or wants a hedge in case the organisation gets too independent too quickly (more likely)

Why is the second reason more likely? In the first instance, even as the CMI has developed, Japan been signing BSAs in increasing numbers, particular to its ASEAN partners (China has also extended similar). That has to reflect a certain dissatisfaction with the CMI. Moreover this dissatisfaction is likely to do this future voting weights. With Japan only holding a likely 32% of the future voting weight, China and ASEAN can vote themselves access to the CMI treasure chest over Japan. Japan would still rather have a larger (veto-ing) voice in the future CMI. But at the same time Japan seems locked in competition to provide economic security to ASEAN, both with the US and IMF and increasingly with China. The result is support for the CMI and at the same time BSAs.

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