Monetary Transmissions Immediately after the Crisis in East Asia

We examine dynamic patterns of macroeconomic variables in East Asia immediately after the Asian financial crisis. Particularly, focusing on East Asia, we can identify their distinctive features from those of aggregate cross-country results. Also, we check with the financial crises in East Asia in the 1980s in order to make sure to what extent the contrast between the aggregate cross-country results and that of the Asian financial crisis comes from differences in time (external environment) or in country structure or both. Some distinctive features in East Asia include higher real interest rates in the crisis year, persistent output as well as investment slowdown, and different behaviors of trade and fiscal surpluses after the crisis. The results suggest that initial monetary tightening be responsible for the unexpectedly serious recession and that favorable external conditions and fiscal stimulus did contribute to the post-crisis real recovery even without credit recoveries.macroeconomic dynamics, East Asia, financial crisis

Financial Linkages and Business Cycles of Japan: An Analysis Using Financial Conditions Index

This paper constructs a financial conditions index (FCI) for Japan, using vector autoregressions (VAR) and impulse responses functions, and then investigate the effect of financial shocks on business cycles of Japan. Based upon our estimation results, we found that, in addition to the trade channel, the financial linkage played a significant role in Japanese business downturn caused by the current global financial crisis, and that its effect has come mainly from fallen stock prices and exchange rate appreciation, but not from credit crunch or the financial accelerator mechanism as had been the case in the recession in the early 1990s.financial conditions index (FCI), financial linkages, international business cycle transmission, vector autoregressions, global financial crisis

Global Shocks and the Japanese Economy:Structural Changes in the 1990s

This paper analyzes how those global shocks as foreign business cycles and exchange rate realignments affect the Japanese economy and whether there are structural changes in the transmission mechanism of these shocks in the recent period by using a VAR model. This paper finds that, since the 1990s the impact of exchange rate changes on the Japanese economy has become smaller and/or insignificant. But the spillover effect of business cycles in U.S. and Europe turns out to have become larger and that from East Asia, once being small and insignificant, become large and significant in the 2000s. To sum up, the Japanese economy has appeared to re-couple with the world and regional business cycles in the recent period.global shocks, de-coupling, expenditure switching

Credit Crunch in East Asia: A Retrospective

In this paper, we explore the issue on credit crunch from a comparative perspective. Utilizing longer time series data, we investigate the existence of credit crunch in selected crisis-hit economies in East Asia over the period 1980-2002. We detected some episodes of credit crunch both before and after the Asian economic crisis. These episodes after the Crisis are somewhat different from those detected by previous studies on the issue. We, then, review the credit-crunch episodes in the broad macroeconomic context in order to assess our results in the longer-run perspective. We are well aware that financial liberalization has changed the financial environments of these countries more or less in due course. Even so, the mixed results we obtained on the existence of credit crunch do not suggest that the impact of the austerity programs on financial intermediation after the Asian Crisis was ambiguous. On the contrary, they implied that the impact of the programs were so severe that credit crunch or supply retrenchment was overwhelmed by a sharp fall in credit demand because of real and expected persistent overall economic depression.credit crunch, East Asia, Asian Economic Crisis, disequilibrium analysis