This paper explores two policy options in emerging market economies (EMEs) to cope with volatile capital flows due to external monetary policy shocks; capital control policy and choice of exchange rate regime. Both tools reinforce each other when a foreign exchange risk premium shock hits the economy. A contractionary U.S. monetary policy shock has significant real effects in EMEs. Conventional wisdom tells us that a free floating exchange rate with inflation targeting is better when a country faces foreign shocks. However, we show that a flexible exchange rate with less capital controls is not the best option in EMEs based on vector autoregression analysis. Moreover, we set up a small open economy new Keynesian model with real wage and price rigidities. It shows that the small economy with labor market frictions is more vulnerable to exogenous shocks such as a foreign exchange rate shock under a fixed exchange rate regime than under a flexible exchange regime. We show that maintaining price stability is not desirable when there are substantial frictions in the labor market and the intratemporal elasticity of substitution is high. Finally, the model shows that the welfare cost difference between a policy of maintaining purchasing power and a policy aimed at price stability reverses as the intratemporal elasticity of substitution between home and foreign goods increases.

This paper studies the unusual features of emerging economy business cycles in Asia. When we assess whether approaches from the previous literature can explain Asian business cycles, we conclude that standard models based on permanent growth shocks do not replicate key features of Asian business cycles. The evidence suggests that different transmission mechanisms explain the connections between consumption, net exports, and export or import in Latin America and Asia. For evidence of a special transmission mechanism, we study durable goods business cycles in Asia (Korea), noting that strong pro-cyclical durable goods consumption may be explained by the export-income channel coupled with market laddering by which firms have expanded the variety and quality of their durable goods production.

This paper examines the effects of internal (or regional) vs. external (inter-regional) integration and of trade vs. financial integration on regional business cycle synchronization in Asia. The empirical results show the following: (1) similar and strong common external linkages have significant positive effects on regional business cycle synchronization; (2) after controlling for external linkages, internal trade integration has a positive effect on regional business cycle synchronization but internal financial integration has a negative effect; and (3) the measures of external linkages, particularly the measure of external financial linkages, are more important than those of internal linkages in explaining regional business cycle co-movements.

This paper analyzes the empirical relationships among demographic changes, saving, and current account balances in East Asia. The panel Vector-Auto Regressive (VAR) model shows that an increase in the dependency rate, especially the elderly dependency rate, significantly lowers saving rates and subsequently worsens current account balances. The result implies that the future aging of the population in East Asia would have a significant impact on global capital flows and current account imbalances.

This paper estimates the degree of risk sharing for each of 10 East Asian countries with countries in the region and with OECD countries by using cross-country consumption correlations and formal regression analysis. Risk sharing is found to be far from complete and quite low for most of the countries. Taiwan and Singapore have the highest risk sharing. Indonesia and Malaysia have the lowest (and significantly negative) risk sharing. The degree of risk sharing does not increase in most countries over 1970–2000. For the less-developed countries, potential gains from risk sharing would be larger with OECD countries than with East Asian countries.