Chapter 7 introduces students to the monetary and financial dimensions of East Asian international relations, which are fragmented regionally while tied closely with the Western-dominated monetary order. Monetary power is arguably as important as military power, but it is not well understood and not commonly included in an IR textbook. As a social construction, monetary and financial power are related to but not equivalent to productive power. East Asia does not stand in isolation, because its contemporary monetary and financial practices and theories are integrated into the global system. Thus, this chapter examines U.S. dollar hegemony. Following a broader discussion of the exchange-rate regimes adopted by East Asian nations, the chapter discusses the 1997–1998 Asian Financial Crisis, a monumental event in post-war East Asian international relations triggered by a currency crisis. The chapter ends with a discussion of the 2008 Great Recession.

The South Korean economy began to grow rapidly in the 1960s, enabling it to converge with the advanced countries in per capita product. It did so as the leadership change enhanced state capacity. The government intervened pervasively in the economy, making sure that firms receiving the favors used them properly. The size of the government itself was small, but the macroeconomic policy was inflationary. The resultant inflation affected the way financial policy, the most important policy at the time, worked. The export promotion policy degenerated as the government employed non-price measures while the price incentives fell in spite of the 1964 exchange rate reform because of inflation, whereas the reform helped to check import growth. Nonetheless, exports grew rapidly, providing important dynamism for the economy. South Korea coped with the emerging balance of payments problem by normalizing its diplomatic relationship with Japan and sending troops to Vietnam.

Monetary policy aims at stabilizing an economy through central bank management of the money supply to influence aggregate demand. Constraints on the policy framework are imposed by the Trilemma which holds that policymakers cannot have all three of: open capital markets; an independent monetary policy; and a pegged exchange rate. Exercise of options varies within the Emerging East Asia region. Hong Kong with its globally integrated financial market pegs its exchange rate to the US dollar giving up discretion over monetary policy. China with its state-dominated economy imposes controls on foreign capital flows allowing separation of monetary and exchange rate policies. Mostly though, the region’s capital markets are open enough that the interest rate and the exchange rate intertwine as instruments of policy. Against external shock, central banks lean against currency volatility, with monetary policy following along. Sterilization of foreign exchange market intervention operates within limited space lest speculative capital flows bet against the central bank. Singapore makes for an interesting case study of exchange rate–based monetary policy.

The digitalised medical and health records of citizens are stored in the Electronic Health Records (EHR) of hospitals or clinics, and Personal Healthcare Records (PHR). The quality of medical care is improved when physicians can access the past records of patients. A user-friendly service that enables individual citizens to share their health and medical records in PHR with their physicians is essential to achieve this. In order to encourage patients and physicians to share medical records utilising PHR, while avoiding conflict with the recent trend demanding that citizens have autonomous control of their own personal information, governments have to develop legal measures to encourage individual citizens to take the initiative to record their medical and health data in their PHR and to give their physicians access to it. The author proposes mathematical schemes that can be implemented in the legal incentives deemed suitable for such encouragement.

Using “average" indicators is simply misleading in most occasions, and firm-level analysis allows a much more targeted set of policies. Firm-level analysis is an essential tool to complement and integrate the macro assessment and related policy response across the whole range of productivity drivers – from labour to trade, from finance to competition. The great advantage of the CompNet dataset is that is built in such a fashion to be able to be used – as it is and directly – to derive at the very least a first set of granular stylised facts to inform policy considerations. Users can use the dataset to assess competitiveness, financial constraints and sensitivity to exchange rate fluctuations. The book has also presented a wide variety of applications of firm-level-based analysis which goes over and above the mere presentation of stylised facts and joint distributions coming directly out of the dataset, including zombie firms impacts, export and participation in global value chains and concentration and market power.

This chapter examines how industry-level markups evolved over the period of Abenomics. Prior to Abenomics during the global financial crisis, the aggregate markups in the manufacturing sector declined by 3.6 percent from 2006 to 2009 and bounced back by 3.2 percent from 2009 to 2012. The fall and rise of productivities contributed the most to the U-shape recovery of manufacturing markups. Over the Abenomics period (2012–2015), markups increased more in the manufacturing sector than in the service sector, and the rise in output prices was responsible for this trend. We discuss some suggestive implications why the first arrow of Abenomics – aggressive monetary policy – effectively improved manufacturing industries’ markups. In a global economic environment where Japanese firms compete with foreign firms, depreciation of the yen eases global price competition and improves their profitability in terms of the yen.

Israel’s balance of payments changed dramatically between 1995 and 2015. These years mark a period of transition from deficits to surpluses in the current account. Among the factors behind this reversal were a sound macroeconomic policy, the global boom in high-tech industries, and the discovery of natural gas on Israel’s coast in the Mediterranean Sea. The transition reflects an increase in the national saving rate and a decline in the rate of national investment. While these important changes were taking place, the financial account of the balance of payments also shifted due to various structural changes, such as the completion of foreign exchange market liberalization and a shift to a floating exchange rate regime. Owing to the foregoing developments, Israel has become a net lender to the rest of the world. In this chapter we analyze and quantify these major changes and assess the extent to which the existence of current account surpluses be considered as a sustainable phenomenon.

The Brazilian developmental state changed significantly after 1985, with new rhetoric about equality, a commitment to fighting inflation, and a three-pronged policy set combining fiscal responsibility, a floating exchange rate, and inflation targeting. Yet many elements of the “old” developmental state remained intact, including a large state role, a complex monetary regime, muscular industrial policies, low economic integration, and a segmented labor market. The fight against inflation generated incentives for politicians to employ “fiscally opaque” policy instruments drawn from the tool kit of the developmental state. The fiscal imperative combined with fiscally opaque instruments contributed to the high cost of credit and low investment, driving firms to demand state succor. The fiscal imperative and the power of interest groups meant that the burden of balancing the fiscal accounts fell disproportionately on the less well-off. The ensuing demand for social spending meant that economic growth, by default, became a residual.

Each Contracting Party shall guarantee that all payments relating to an investment by an investor of the other Contracting Party may be freely transferred into and out of its territory without delay.

Like the bittersweet drama of tango dancers performing on Calle Florida for shoppers leaving Buenos Aires’ posh Galerías Pacífico shopping center, Argentina’s political and economic leaders stepped out of Latin America’s sorrowful “lost decade” of the 1980s with a series of dramatic policy changes that led the country through grand successes, devastating failures and postcrisis resurgences. Like the dancers shifting to changes in musical tempo, Argentine presidents and ministers of the economy responded to fluctuations in global markets and domestic politics with dips and twirls, driving forward and occasionally reversing direction with great fanfare. Their moves generated both praise and scorn, winning Argentina the diverse imprimaturs – at different moments in time – of “poster child” of the Washington Consensus, “defaulting pariah” of international bondholders, “vanguard” of Latin American populism and the “victim of vulture investors” that threatened to undermine debt restructuring agreements around the globe.