The financial trilemma in China and a comparative analysis with India

A key challenge facing most emerging market economies today is how to simultaneously maintain monetary independence, exchange rate stability and financial integration subject to the constraints imposed by the Trilemma, in an era of widespread globalization. In this paper we overview and contrast the Trilemma policy choices and tradeoffs faced by the two key drivers of global economic growth-China and India. China’s Trilemma configurations are unique relative to other emerging markets in the predominance of exchange rate stability, and in the failure of the Trilemma regression to capture a consistently significant role for financial integration. In contrast, the Trilemma configurations of India are in line with choices made by other emerging countries. India like other emerging economies has overtime converged towards a middle ground between the three policy objectives, and has achieved comparable levels of exchange rate stability and financial integration buffered by sizeable international reserves.