Introduction
Developing Asia remains at the core of global payment imbalances. Globally, developing Asia’s net current account surplus amounted to 36 per cent of the world’s current account surpluses in 2010, while averaging about 30 per cent during the past decade (see Figure 1).The region has also accumulated sizable—and in some cases excessive foreign exchange reserves since the late 1990s.1 The bulk of the remaining current account surpluses were in the Middle East and the Commonwealth of Independent States. On the other side of the ledger, the USA continues to be home for the lion’s share of global current account deficits
The geographical concentration of current account imbalances is rather significant in developing Asia, with the People’s Republic of China accounting for the lion’s share of the region’s current account surplus. The most significant surpluses have been in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), with its current account surpluses accounting for 48.7 per cent of Asia’s total for the period 2005–2010. Excluding Japan, where surpluses have been large but stable, the PRC’s share of the region’s current account surplus is nearly 68.2 per cent over this period. The PRC’s contribution to the region’s reserves accumulation has been also substantial-its reserves now account for over 60 per cent of emerging Asia’s total. Then follow the four newly industrializing economies (NIEs) of Hong Kong, China; Republic of Korea (Korea); Taipei,China; and Singapore; and other large Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) economies In contrast, several emerging Asian economies—including India and Vietnam have been running current account deficits. While how emerging Asia contributes to global rebalancing depends critically on the PRC, the NIEs and larger ASEAN economies will also have to contribute depending on the size of their surpluses. The region’s economic diversity requires a wide-ranging set of policy measures to tackle the domestic, regional, and global imbalances. The PRC needs to play a critical role in the region’s contribution to global rebalancing—given the large and increasing size of its economy and external imbalances [see Asian Development Bank (ADB) 2009]. But the NIEs and larger ASEAN economies will also have to contribute, depending on the size of their surpluses. Many of the region’s smaller economies also face country-specific external imbalances, even if their contribution to the overall global imbalance remains negligible Understanding these different policy requirements is essential to achieving more harmonious global, regional, and domestic rebalancing. Ultimately, a concerted and coordinated regional approach will be key to an orderly global rebalancing process. Concerted policy adjustments can potentially reinforce this process through two key channels. First, there are important positive spillover when countries work together to boost demand while avoiding unnecessary adverse movements in intra-regional exchange rates. Second, enhancing intra-regional trade offers each of the region’s economies a high degree of trade openness—with all associated benefits—even as the region as a whole becomes less dependent on extra-regional demand. Global imbalances and Asia While running current account surpluses or deficits, per Southeastern, is not necessarily a cause of concern for an economy, the current condition of global payment imbalances is alarming in their size, persistence, and geographic concentration, raising significant concerns about their sustainability. There is no reason why an economy has to balance its current account position at all times. In theory, as the result of voluntary choices of economic entities driven by the desire for inter-temporal consumption smoothing, current account imbalances do not necessarily pose an economic danger. These imbalances are simply a reflection of different patterns of savings and investment behaviour across economic entities, which are strongly influenced by income growth, trade volatility, ability to access international funding, and demographics. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental concern that deficit countries cannot go into debt forever. Many have argued the US current account deficits at current rates are not sustainable and potentially destabilizing Some distinctive characteristics of the current imbalances provide the ground for concerns, not least because the deficit countries (the US in this case) cannot continue building debts indefinitely. From the perspective of the developing economies in Asia, the persistent, large current account surpluses present a puzzle and involve both explicit and implicit costs. Economic theory says capital flows from advanced economies with abundant capital to developing economies with capital shortages. Both capital-rich and capital-poor countries benefit from these flows as they increase labour productivity in capital-poor countries and provide higher returns on savings for capital-rich countries. However, the current pattern of international capital flows from developing Asia to the USA casts doubt on the optimal of the region’s excess savings. A number of hypotheses have been put forward to explain the puzzle, such as large fiscal deficits,declining private savings, and high productivity growth in the USA; financial globalization and a global savings glut; and relatively underdeveloped financial markets, crisis-induced risk aversion, and exchange rate pegs in developing Asian economies. None of these hypotheses seems to provide a clear answer to why such a pattern has emerged; but the cost of the global imbalances—whether it is implicit in terms of the welfare cost of excess saving and foregone investment benefits of excess reserves or explicit in terms of the cost of crisis—is abundantly clear (see Adams and Park 2009). Although there is no single explanation for international payment imbalances, the underlying cause appears to be the stark differences in saving and investment behavior across economies. The striking differences in national saving and investment behaviour must reflect the different macroeconomic and exchange rate policies, as well as structural factors—with the usual suspects being the stage of economic development, the degree of financial development, and demographics (see Figures 2 and 3). In Asia, current account imbalances have visibly increased since the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis, suggesting that there must have been some policy factors in play beyond the longterm structural factors. For example, large current account surpluses also derived from the success of outward-orientated growth strategies that supported high levels of extra-regional exports at the expense of bolstering domestic demand. Strong exports in the aftermath of the 1997–98 crisis contributed significantly to the region’s rapid recovery and growth in the post-crisis period leading up to the recent global crisis. The region’s substantially large external imbalances also reflect its post 1997-98 crisis efforts to build strong international reserves. In many of the region’s economies, imbalances have also come from a determined effort to build large stockpiles of (gross) international reserves In response to the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, authorities sought self-insurance against the kinds of capital flow reversals that occurred then and during other episodes of systemic stress. This was also done with an eye to managing stress in international financial markets. Nonetheless, the aggregate Asia’s picture masks important differences in external positions across the region and over time. Although Asia, in aggregate, has had large current account surpluses since the 1997–98 financial crisis, this masks important differences in external positions across the region and over time (Figure 4) Different structural reasons underlie a rather wide spectrum of current account imbalances across the region. In the PRC, unusually high savings rates (and unusually low consumption rates) reflect its rapid GDP growth, unfavourable demographic changes, inadequate social safety nets, and largely underdeveloped financial markets unable to efficiently channel these savings into productive investment In the Asian crisis-affected countries, sharp declines in investment rates following a period of over-investment and more stringent evaluation of financial risks in the post-crisis may provide an explanation In India and Vietnam, relatively large fiscal deficits may explain the current account deficits. Meanwhile, most emerging Asian economies have accelerated the pace of reserves accumulation since the Asian financial crisis (Figure 5). The increase was largely due to a combination of sustained current account surpluses and persistent exchange market intervention. The exceptions were India and Vietnam, where reserves were largely ‘borrowed’ in the sense that the reserve build-up derived from large financial and capital account surpluses that exceeded the current account deficits.