Financial Liberalization In Korea Japan And The United States

The analysis shows how financial development has occurred in two distinct phases. Initially, interest rates were regulated to remain below market levels, entry of new financial institutions was restricted, financial markets were segmented, and domestic finance was insulated from world financial markets. The second phase has seen a steady, if sometimes slow, removal of these restrictions.

Korea's financial development has been a tale of liberalization and opening but the new system has failed to steer the country away from financial crises. This study analyzes the changes in the financial system and finds that financial liberalization has contributed little to grow and stabilize the Korean economy.

The financial crisis that hit a number of 'miracle' economies of Asia in 1997 shocked the world. Financial Liberalization and the Asian Crisis rejects conventional explanations of the crisis as the outcome primarily of inefficient and corrupt economics systems in the countries concerned. It argues that the crisis was the result of premature and overly rapid financial liberalization in a world of increasing financial liquidity and volatility, and calls for a more cautious approach to financial liberalization, and a reform of the international financial architecture.

The increased mobility and volume of international capital flows is a striking trend in international finance. While countries worldwide have engaged in financial deregulation, nowhere is this pattern more pronounced than in East Asia, where it has affected in unanticipated ways the behavior of exchange rates, interest rates, and capital flows. In these thirteen essays, American and Asian scholars analyze the effects of financial deregulation and integration on East Asian markets. Topics covered include the roles of the United States and Japan in trading with Asian countries, macroeconomic policy implications of export-led growth in Korea and Taiwan, the effects of foreign direct investment in China, and the impact of financial liberalization in Japan, Korea, and Singapore. Demonstrating the complexity of financial deregulation and the challenges it poses for policy makers, this volume provides an excellent picture of the overall status of East Asian financial markets for scholars in international finance and Asian economic development.

First published in 1999, this book explores the question of is the business organisation a result of efficiency or is it a result of a state-business organisation a result of a state-business interaction? This question being in the context of the Korean chaebol system and the Japanese Keiretsu system; this book explores the political and economic growth and then the following down fall of these systems occurred without rupturing either country’s state policy regarding the chaebol or the keiretsu.

The Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998 was supposed to be the death knell for the developmental state. The International Monetary Fund supplied emergency funds for shattered economies but demanded that states liberalize financial markets and withdraw from direct involvement in the economy. Financial liberalization was meant to spell the end of strategic industry policy and the state-directed "policy lending" it involved. Yet, largely unremarked by analysts, South Korea has since seen a striking revival of financial activism. Policy lending by state-owned development banks has returned the state to the core of the financial system. Korean development banks now account for one quarter of all loans and take the lead in providing low-cost finance to local manufacturing firms in strategic industries. Elizabeth Thurbon argues that an ideational analysis can help explain this renewed financial activism. She demonstrates the presence of a "developmental mindset" on the part of political leaders and policy elites in Korea. This mindset involves shared ways of thinking about the purpose of finance and its relationship to the productive economy. The developmental mindset has a long history in Korea but is subject to the vicissitudes of political and economic circumstances. Thurbon traces the structural, institutional, political, and ideational factors that have strengthened and at times weakened the developmental consensus, culminating in the revival of financial activism in Korea. In doing so, Thurbon offers a novel defense of the developmental state idea and a new framework for investigating the emergence and evolution of developmental states. She also canvasses the implications of the Korean experience for wider debates concerning the future of financial activism in an era of financialization, energy insecurity, and climate change.