Kim Heungchong’s research while affiliated with Korea Institute for International Economic Policy and other places

This paper investigates possible paths of East Asian Monetary Integration. After a brief analysis of current discussions on East Asian economic and monetary integration, the paper presents possible implications of Europe's EMU project for East Asia and the political economy of East Asia as constraints on East Asia's way towards monetary integration. The paper argues that whichever paths East Asia selects, countries in the region have to devise measures that can lead to stability convergence, which was the main success factor for the introduction of single currency in Europe. The paper also presents seven possible paths for East Asian monetary integration, and argues that only four of them are feasible strategic choices. The paper concludes that although all these four paths are potential candidates, they have to be complemented by additional policy instruments. The paper suggests these additional measures be targeted at intensifying stability convergence in East Asia, which was the most important prerequisite for a successful introduction of Euro, the single currency for twelve member countries of the European Union. After a brief efficiency and feasibility test the paper selected the option of "developing the Chiang Mai Initiative to a Multilateral Financing Scheme" as the best short- and medium-term strategy towards monetary integration.

The aim of the paper is to derive potential Korean exports to major African countries. Park (2001) adopted conventional RCA and MCA techniques to evaluate the relative performance of Korean exports to draw up a list of recommendable exports to Africa. We improve Park's results in two ways; first, we develop a new indicator reflecting the characteristics of the African market, which was ignored in the former analysis, and second, we derive the RCA and MCA values of Chinese and Japanese exports to Africa and compare them with those of Korean products. The final list of Korea's potential exports to the African market is carefully derived and we find that competing with Japanese exports rather than Chinese ones is a more appropriate strategy for amending Korea's record of underperforming exports to Africa.