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With the rise of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as the world’s largest trading nation (measured by trade value) and second largest economic power (measured by GDP), its economic influence over the neighboring emerging economies in East Asia has also risen. The PRC introduced some exchange rate flexibility in July 2005, and in the wake of the global financial crisis has been pursuing a policy to internationalize its currency, the renminbi (RMB). Clearly the exchange rate policy of the PRC has significant implications for exchange rate regimes in emerging East Asia. This paper examines the behavior of the RMB exchange rate and the impact of RMB movements on those of other currencies in emerging East Asia during the period 2000–2014. We apply the Frankel–Wei regression model to identify changes in the RMB exchange rate regime over time and a modified version of the model, developed by the authors in their earlier paper, to estimate the RMB weight in an emerging East Asian economy’s currency basket. We find that the US dollar continues to be the dominant anchor currency in the region, while the RMB has taken on increasing importance in the currency baskets of many East Asian economies in recent years. The paper also explores how monetary and currency cooperation—led by the PRC and Japan—can promote intra-East Asian exchange rate stability under the pressure of rising financial market openness in the PRC.

This paper examines whether the renminbi (RMB) has supplanted the US dollar as the major anchor currency in the currency baskets of East Asian economies. It systematically demonstrates that existing techniques to address the problem of severe multicollinearity in estimations of the Frankel¬–Wei regression model, with the movements in both the RMB and the US dollar included on the right-hand side of the equation, remain limited in providing stable and robust results. The paper proposes a simple modification of the Frankel–Wei regression model to estimate the RMB weight in an economy’s currency basket. Using this new approach, findings show there is not yet an RMB bloc in East Asia, contrary to claims made by some recent studies, with the US dollar continuing to be the dominant anchor currency in the region. The RMB has taken on some importance in the currency baskets of many East Asian economies in recent years and this appears to have occurred at the expense of the yen. In short, despite the rising importance of the RMB, it has not eclipsed the US dollar as the dominant anchor currency in East Asia.

An Asian Currency Unit (ACU) index is constructed using an alternative procedure which minimizes a basket or portfolio of assets expressed in terms of national currencies. Using this estimated ACU index and an ACU Deviation Indicator, the main finding of this study based on the current trajectory of East Asian currencies relative to this regional ACU average or benchmark is that there is a formation of two contrasting groups of countries in the region—one a group of strong currencies and the other a group of weak currencies. We emphasize that the implication of this contrasting trajectory in East Asian intra-regional exchange rates is to disturb the competitive trading relationships in the region which may result in wasteful beggar-thyneighbor policies in the region. As emphasized by other recent studies, e.g., Kawai and Takagi (2012), the region needs a kind of framework for exchange rate policy coordination that will promote intra-regional exchange rate stability. We suggest several ways in which the region can capitalize on using this ACU index in the immediate term for surveillance purposes, particularly, for purposes of assessing “over- and undervaluation†of the individual currencies from the regional ACU average and for flagging emerging vulnerabilities in individual economies in the region.

The objective of our paper is to provide an empirical platform to the debate on the macroeconomic consequences of large currency appreciations. Observing the experiences of six major Asian economies (the ASEAN-5 (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Singapore) and Korea) during the past two decades, the primary aim of this study is to ascertain the consequences of strong currencies, on the one hand, and reserves accumulation, on the other, for a set of vital macroeconomic indicators, namely, exports, growth and price. We then deal squarely, in retrospect, with the question of whether there is any justification to the so-called fear of appreciation phenomenon among the policy makers of these Asian economies.

This study seeks to demonstrate that the identification of crisis episodes based on commonly applied exchange market pressure (EMP) indices, namely, Eichengreen, Rose and Wyplosz (1995), Sachs, Tornell and Velasco (1996), and Kaminsky, Lizondo and Reinhart (1998) are highly sensitive to the choice of: a) the weighting scheme for each component of the EMP index; and b) the statistical parametric assumption used in the constructions of crisis thresholds. To highlight further some of the potential consequences of these two pitfalls in identifying crisis episodes, this paper employs a number of possible alternative approaches to measure the exchange market pressure.

By examining exchange market intervention activities of the monetary authority of each country, we revisit an old debate on whether crisis-effected countries in East Asia, namely Indonesia, Korea, Singapore and Thailand, have gone back to their pre-1997 rigid exchange rate policies, or, instead, have they actually moved to a more flexible regime? More importantly, if indeed there has been a shift from a rigid to a more flexible one, was the move a voluntary one, or mainly due to the presence of high market pressures on the currency? Given the absence of publicly available information on intervention in the foreign exchange market during the observation period, we propose an index of central bank intervention activity in the exchange market that also includes overnight market rates. Apart from applying the Markov switching ARCH and the extreme value theory methodologies to the construction of the index, thresholds of exchange rate regimes are also generated and utilized to systematically classify the types of exchange rate regimes that these East Asian countries adopted during the post-1997 financial crisis.

The accumulations of foreign debts had indeed been at a rapid phase, particularly during the last few years leading to the outbreak of the 1997 financial crises in the four most severely effected economies, namely Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Korea. Interestingly, during the same period, the rates of overshooting of these East Asian currencies have also been found to increase considerably. The objective of this paper is to evaluate whether the rapid accumulation of external debts, especially since 1994, has contributed to the overshooting of the East Asian countries' currencies starting late 1997.

The objective of this study is to identify and date the episodes of high speculative attack periods against the Indonesian rupiah over the last fifteen years (i.e. from 1985 to 2003). From the findings, we hope to address the following set of questions. Had rupiah indeed been stable prior to its meltdown in the third quarter 1997? Arguably a more relevant question to be addressed at this point is whether the rupiah has stabilized, as measured by a relatively moderate EMP index, since its worst fall in late 1997? This study also hopes to introduce a simple measurement index to detect the presence of market pressures in the foreign exchange market, and to illustrate a reliable methodology to estimate a “threshold” separating low market pressures from the extreme ones.

The objective of this study is to identify and date the episodes of high speculative attack periods against the Indonesian rupiah over the last fifteen years (i.e. from 1985 to 2003). From the findings, we hope to address the following set of questions. Had rupiah indeed been stable prior to its meltdown in the third quarter 1997? Arguably a more relevant question to be addressed at this point is whether the rupiah has stabilized, as measured by a relatively moderate EMP index, since its worst fall in late 1997? This study also hopes to introduce a simple measurement index to detect the presence of market pressures in the foreign exchange market, and to illustrate a reliable methodology to estimate a ''threshold'' separating low market pressures from the extreme ones.

Early constructions of a single crisis index known as the exchange market pressure (EMP) index have largely been based on the fluctuations of the real or nominal exchange rate of a currency against the US dollar ---the most commonly accepted anchor currency in the global market. Hardly any studies have however tested the sensitivity of this crisis index to the choice of “the anchor” currency. To address this pertinent issue, our study considers the case of Thailand for the period of 1985 to 2003. The test results indicate that the EMP index of the baht / the US dollar rate reported substantially less number of speculative attacks against the baht than that reported by the EMP index of the baht / the Japanese yen rate.

A common feature of numerous studies on early warning systems (EWS) of currency crisis is the use of an index of exchange market pressure, defined as a weighted average of the rate of depreciation, the monthly percentage changes in international reserves, and sometimes the inclusion of the monthly change in the interest rate, in order to identify and proxy the occurrence of currency crisis. Crucial to this approach is the appropriate definition of a currency crisis, and the literature has usually defined currency crisis occurring when the measure of exchange market pressure exceeds a certain threshold. The main theme of the paper is that not only is the use of a threshold in defining currency crisis as arbitrary, but a much more careful examination of the basic statistical distribution of the measures of exchange market pressure will reveal that the conventional method of defining currency crisis is statistically flawed or inaccurate in capturing the 'true' dispersion of any given exchange market pressure series. This study applies an alternative statistical method known as Extreme Value Analysis (EVA) to three different weighting schemes popularly adopted in the literature in constructing exchange market pressure indexes, namely the Eichengreen-Rose-Wyplosz (ERW), the Sachs-Tornell-Velasco (STV) and the Kaminsky-Lizondo-Reinhart (KLR). The application of EVA leads to more incidences of currency crises being identified or 'captured' compared to the conventional method across a number of countries in East Asia and Latin America from 1985 to 2003

The key objective of our study is to re-examine again the stability of selected East Asian currencies. Had there been any other attacks on these currencies prior to their meltdowns in 1997? Equally important, have the currencies stabilized during the post-1997 crisis? To address these questions, we adopt the concept of exchange market pressure (EMP) index of Kaminsky, Lizondo, and Reinhart (1998). Due to non-normality of the statistical distribution of the EMP indices in general, this study applies the Extreme Value Theory (EVT) as proposed by Huisman, Koedijk, Kool, and Palm (2001). Lastly, we document events that arguably contribute to speculative attacks on these currencies.