In creating a regional bond fund, central banks in East Asia and the Pacific worked to reduce impediments in eight local markets. Moreover, they built into the fund’s structure an incentive mechanism for reducing impediments further

This volume is a collection of the speeches, presentations and papers from a conference on "The International Financial Crisis and Policy Challenges in Asia and the Pacific". The event was co-hosted by the People's Bank of China (PBC) and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) to mark the...

Trading in non-deliverable forwards on Asian currencies has grown in recent years. The offshore interest rates implied by these contracts differ significantly from onshore interest rates and suggest upward pressure on most Asian currencies

Foreign exchange turnover in Asian currencies grew faster than the global total between 2001 and 2004. Renminbi trading rose particularly strongly. Evolving expectations about the Renminbi seem to be joining the dollar/yen spot rate in exerting an influence on Asian foreign exchange markets....

Economic and financial integration has reshaped the monetary policy frameworks and transmission channels in the emerging market economies (EMEs) over the past two decades. Economic and financial linkages have become stronger, resulting in greater synchronization of business cycles across...

Our paper attempts to enhance the understanding of China's monetary policy rule, which may help explain the country's remarkable inflation performance over the past decade, in spite of the absence of explicit inflation targeting. In particular, we aim to shed light on the role of inflation in...

Corporate bond markets in Asia differ widely in size. Some primary markets have opened up to foreign issuers while others have relied on quasigovernment issuers. Secondary markets often suffer from illiquidity, due in varying degrees to narrow investor bases, inadequate microstructures and a...

The renminbi (RMB) has evolved in four phases since its mid-2005 unpegging from the US dollar. After a year's transition, the RMB's effective exchange rate traded for two years within narrow bands around an appreciating trend. That is, the RMB behaved as if it were managed to strengthen...

Asia's economic integration into the global system has many dimensions. It is part of the broader globalization process that has taken place over the past two decades and involves dynamics of convergence, integration, and interactions of both real and financial activities. Section 1 examines...