The recent emergence of new capital markets and the relaxation of foreign capital
controls, which has opened the possibility of international investment and portfolio
diversification, have increased the interest of academics and practitioners in studying
the degree of financial integration of these markets. In this paper, the analysis is focused on the Pacific-Basin region, which constitutes an important part of emerging
capital markets. The countries in our sample are: Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea,
Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand. In 1998, these markets constituted 43 percent of emerging markets capitalisation, while in 1999 this figure had
risen to 47 percent.
Financial integration is measured by testing the law of one price to financial assets
with the same risk. For our selected group of countries work has concentrated on
testing the international parity conditions. For example, Bhoocha-Oom and Stansell
(1990) look at interest rates (adjusted and unadjusted for exchange rates changes)
between Hong Kong and Singapore versus US. Faruquee (1992) examines the
uncovered interest rate differential between Singapore, Korea and Thailand versus
the Japanese LIBOR—taken to represent the world rate of interest. Dooley and
Mathieson (1994) look at seven Pacific Basin countries versus US using an analytical
framework for interest rate determination, where the prevailing interest rate represents a weighted average of open (US interest rate adjusted for the change in the
exchange rate) and closed economy rates that would have existed otherwise. Reisen
and Yeches (1993) using the same framework examine Korea and Taiwan by applying the Kalmar Filter technique to capture changes in the degree of integration
over time.
The results of these studies support the view that there is substantial integration
between domestic and international financial markets in Hong Kong, Singapore,
Malaysia, Philippines and Indonesia, while the views are divided for Korea and
Thailand. In Taiwan capital market integration with worldfinancial markets was
found to be limited. Using, however, a different method of measuring capital mobility
based on a portfolio balance model, Chinn and Maloney (1998) found evidence of a
greater degree of openness in Taiwan since early 1989. The extensive capital market
integration in the Pacific Basin Region has also been supported by Phylaktis (1999),
when in addition to looking at long-run comovements of real interest rates, another
indicator of the degree of capital market integration was used, namely the speed of
adjustment of real interest rates to long-run equilibrium following a shock in one of
the markets. Thus, even in countries like Taiwan and to a lesser extent Korea, where
controls were substantial in both countries, extensive linkages have been found with
world capital markets.
Similar conclusions have been found in studies, which have looked at stock markets and tested whether stocks with the same risk i.e. exposure to a common world
factor, have identical expected returns irrespective of the market. In the case when
a market is segmented from the rest of the world however, its covariance with a
common world factor will not be able to explain its expected return. Bekaert and
Harvey (1995) allowed conditionally expected returns in a country to be affected by
their covariance with a world benchmark portfolio when the market is perfectly integrated and by the variance of the country returns when it is completely segmented. Using a conditional regime-switching model to account for periods when
national markets were segmented from world capital markets and when they became
integrated later in the sample, they applied the model to a group of emerging capital
markets including Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia and Thailand over the period 1975 to
1992. They found that integration was substantial for the entire period not only for
Malaysia, which had less investment restrictions, but also for Korea and Taiwan,
which had substantial foreign ownership restrictions. In the case of Thailand, a large
shift in the degree of integration was noted in 1987 when foreign ownership restrictions were relaxed.
The current paper attempts to provide an explanation for the high degree of financial market integration, which has been found even in the presence of foreign
exchange controls, by examining whether economic integration plays a role in linking
the financial markets. Real economic integration has been measured in many ways
and refers to the international trade links between countries. Frequent measures
include the degree of openness calculated as the ratio of exports and/or imports
between countries to national output; the amount of price and quantitative restrictions
on traded goods; and the extent of contemporaneous movement of output growth
between countries, which is based on the theory that substantial trade interdependence transmits economic activity from one country to the other producing a common
business cycle.
However one measures economic integration, it can provide channels in linking
the financial markets even in the presence of foreign exchange restrictions on international capital flows. For example, economic integration, if that is measured by the
contemporaneous movement of output growth of countries, provides a channel for
financial integration through the effects of expected economic activity on the
expected cashflows of firms and their stock prices. Thus, if two countries experience
a comovement in their output then their cashflows will move together and so will
their stock markets. Empirical studies have confirmed the long-run positive relationship between economic activity and stock prices (see e.g. Schwert, 1990; Roll, 1992; for the US and Canova and DeNicole, 1995 for the European countries).
A look at the list of indicators of economic integration for our group of countries
does not provide a clear picture of whether they are integrated with other countries,
such as Japan and the US. Exports and imports of each Pacific Basin country (PBC)
versus Japan and the US as a percent of GDP are in the region of 5 to 25 percent.
In the absence of a benchmark, however, one cannot be certain of the degree of
economic integration. Neither does the amount of tariffs on trade seem to provide
an accurate picture of real economic integration as non-tariff barriers to trade might
be in existence. Finally, the computed correlations of contemporary monthly industrial production for the period 1990–98 are on the whole not very big (see Table 1).
Contemporaneous movements of output might, however, underestimate the degree
of economic integration because of lags in the international transmission of shocks.
The current paper contributes to the literature in the following ways. First it uses
a different way to measure financial and economic integration to previous studies
on the PBCs based on the framework developed by Ammer and Mei (1996) for Europe and the US, which measures both types of integration by analysing the
covariance of excess returns on national stock markets. The framework uses the
Campbell and Shiller (1988) approximate present value model to decompose excess
stock return innovations between different countries into news about excess returns,
dividend growth rates, interest rates and exchange rates. Comovements of dividend
news between two countries is taken as an indicator of real economic integration.
A real economic shock originating in one country will have a similar effect on the
economic growth of the other country through trade interdependencies, causing corporate earnings and dividends of both countries to move together if they are assumed
as proxies for long-term real economic activity. Comovement in innovations in future
expected stock returns is taken as an indicator of financial integration because if
asset returns in different countries are conditionally multivariate normal so that the
Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) holds, the conditional means of these excess
returns must move together as linear combinations of a set of common risk premiums.
In the case of one factor model with fixed factor loadings (betas), any variation over
time in mean returns would have to be correlated across assets.
This approach has several advantages. It examines financial integration by studying the comovement of future returns aggregated over a long horizon instead of the
comovement of one period expected returns as used in studies by Bakaert and Harvey
(1995, 2000). As Ammer and Mei stress, this methodology could detect small but
persistent comovements in expected returns and more accurately measure the degree
of financial integration than one-period stock returns regression models. Similar comments can be made about the proposed measure of real economic integration compared to measures based on the contemporaneous movements in output. 3 Another
advantage of the framework used in this paper is that both types of integration can
be examined simultaneously and that is important for examining the role of economic
integration in financial integration.