Professor Hee-Yul Chai

Professor Hee-Yul Chai
Kyonggi University, Korea

A Roadmap of Monetary Cooperation in East Asia: Some Lessons from the European Experience

Abstract:

The recent announcement by finance ministers from the East Asian 3 (Korea, China, and Japan) in a meeting of the ADB held at Hyderabad on 3 May, according to which they would take steps to introduce a common currency in East Asia, makes one to suspect that monetary cooperation will become an important policy agenda for regional finance policy forums in East Asia. This paper aims to address some questions about the necessity, feasibility, and modality of East Asia’s monetary cooperation efforts. The questions will be addressed mainly in a comparative perspective with the European Union, which provides a lot of lessens to East Asia through its success as well as failure stories. After having identified some key issues and hurdles related with monetary cooperation in East Asia, this paper proceed to propose a roadmap of monetary cooperation in East Asia. The roadmap is characterized by two-tier and step-by-step approach. It is argued that the cooperation efforts should be concentrated within a narrow circle of countries and enlarged into other countries subsequently, and that three stages should be conceived with qualitative leap in each transition step to achieve an effective monetary cooperation in the region.

Biographical note:

Hee-Yul Chai is Professor of Economics at Kyonggi University, Korea. He currently serves as Editor of Asia-Pacific Journal of EU Studies. He is also a member of Korea’s Official Pool of International Economists, section “International Financial Cooperation,” and a board member of The EU Studies Association of Korea. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from University of Paris 10. He has been maître de conférences (tenured lecturer) at Univerty of Lille 2, research fellow of Korea Institute of Finance, and visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. He is mainly interested in financial policy, Europe’s monetary integration, and financial cooperation in East Asia. His other research interests include health insurance and cooperatives. His most recent research papers include “Monetary and financial cooperation in East Asia in light of the European Experience”, “European Integration and the Change of Europe’s Financial Structure”, “Interactions between the Euro and Europe’s Financial Markets.”

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