iMFdirect – The IMF Blog

By Anoop Singh

(Version in 中文)

Here’s the good news: thanks to relatively strong fundamentals and good policies,  Asian economies have coped well with the global market turbulence of recent years. Now the bad: a major financial shock—say, of type ignited by the bankruptcy of U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers in 2008—is likely to have a substantial impact on Asia.  The reason: Asia’s increasing financial interconnectedness.

Over the past two decades—in line with the region’s growing role in the global economy—Asia’s equity markets have become increasingly sensitive to global financial developments.   More specifically, we have discovered that equity returns in Asia generally now move in tandem with those in systemic economies.  (By systemic economies, we are talking here about those countries—such as the United States and the United Kingdom which are home to major, global, financial centers such as Wall Street and the City of London.)

How do we measure that degree of financial interconnectedness?  Or put another way, how do we measure the relationship—if any—between those Asian equity returns and the performance of systemic economies?

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Filed under: Advanced Economies, Asia, Economic research, Europe, Financial Crisis, Globalization, International Monetary Fund, Investment, Politics | Tagged: Anoop Singh, bankruptcy, betas, China, East Asia, Hong Kong, iMFdirect blog, interconnectedness, Lehman Brothers, macroeconomic policy, research, Singapore, stocks, systemic | 2 Comments »