Grimes Speaks at ADB Annual Meeting in Tokyo
William Grimes, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, spoke on a panel at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Tokyo, Japan on May 4, 2017 .
The panel, entitled “20 Years after the Asian Financial Crisis: Achievements So Far and Way Forward,” featured a number of prominent Asian policymakers, including Indonesian Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati, ASEAN+3 Macroeconomics Research Office Director Junhong Chang, former Bank Negara Malaysia Governor Zeti Akhtar Aziz, and International Monetary Fund Deputy Managing Director Mitsuhiro Furusawa.
Panelists surveyed the history of the Asian Financial Crisis, discussed lessons learned, and deliberated next steps to ensure that East Asian economies would be able to prevent or effectively manage future currency crises.
Grimes’ presentation addressed the political challenges facing regional cooperation efforts, particularly the development of the region’s $240 billion dollar emergency liquidity fund, known as Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization (CMIM). He highlighted the uncertainties generated by populist economic policies in the United States and Europe as well as CMIM’s peculiar internal political challenges.
Making the case that economic cooperation depends on managing political dynamics, he argued that, “At its core, [CMIM] represents a joint understanding between China and Japan that they are primarily responsible for ensuring regional financial stability.” Therefore, he urged East Asian policy makers to ensure that future institutional developments would prevent the potential for Sino-Japanese political rivalry to derail CMIM’s essential economic function.
Grimes, who has taught at Boston University since 1996, is a leading scholar of East Asian financial regionalism. His 2008 book Currency and Contest in East Asia: The Great Power Politics of Financial Regionalism won the 2010 Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize and received Honorable Mention for the 2009 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award. More recently, in conjunction with the Pardee School’s Global Economic Governance Initiative, he led a research project for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) to develop a guide to best practices for regional liquidity arrangements.