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Asia's economic integration into the global system has many dimensions. It is part of the broader globalization process that has taken place over the past two decades and involves dynamics of convergence, integration, and interactions of both real and financial activities. Section 1 examines some of the recent trends in the real and financial interactions between Asia and the rest of the world and among different markets within Asia. It contains four chapters on this theme, addressing the issues of macroeconomic similarities and differences, interactions among Asian stock markets and between them and the US equity market, as well as spillovers across various types of financial markets in the region in response to shocks.

The process of Asia's rise to a position of eminence in global finance has accelerated in the wake of the international financial crisis, posing new opportunities and challenges to both the Asian economies and the global financial and trade systems. This volume represents a significant new endeavor to explore and understand the dynamics created by this process of transition. Specifically, it addresses the following four contemporary themes of the evolving role of Asia in global finance: (a) real and financial interactions among economies and across markets, both within Asia and beyond; (b) regional monetary cooperation in Asia; (c) the decoupling debate over Asia's evolving economic and financial ties with major industrial economies; and (d) the changing roles of domestic finance and capital flows in the developing Asian economies. It sheds light on various dimensions of Asia's economy and finance, ranging from business cycles, exchange rate movements, regional policy coordination, domestic financial development, capital flows, and financial market behavior. These analyses are pooled in a book that is a must read for market participants, policymakers, and academics alike.

This series is aimed at economists and financial economists worldwide and will provide an in-depth look at current global topics. Each volume in the series will focus on specialized topics for greater understanding of the chosen subject and provide a detailed discussion of emerging issues. The target audiences are professional researchers, graduate students, and policy makers. It will offer cutting-edge views on new horizons and deepen the understanding in these emerging topics.

The aim of this chapter is to provide equilibrium exchange rates values for a large set of currencies and to study the adjustment process of observed exchange rates toward these levels by paying special attention to emerging Asian countries. Relying on panel smooth transition regression models, we show that real exchange rate dynamics in the long run are nonlinear for emerging Asian countries, and linear for the G7 currencies. Especially, there exists an asymmetric behavior of the real exchange rate when facing an over- or undervaluation, the adjustment speed being higher in the case of undervaluation in Asia. Although this result may be explained by the international pressure to limit undervaluation, the undervaluation may still persist over time, as has been observed since the beginning of 1990s.

This chapter analyses the impact of the global credit crisis on the money market and discusses its potential implications. The turbulence in money markets has spilled over to foreign exchange (FX)-swap markets amid a reappraisal of counterparty risks during the recent financial turmoil. We examine the situations of six currencies: the euro, the British pound, the Australian dollar, the Japanese yen, the Hong Kong dollar, and the Singapore dollar. We find that (i) the risk premiums have indeed gone in tandem with the spreads of money market rates over their corresponding overnight index swaps across the economies, a popular measure of potential banking insolvency; and (ii) the risk premiums bear a negative relationship with the strength of the spot rates of the respective currencies, which is consistent with the increased pressure in the money and swap markets.