William W. Grimes’s research while affiliated with Boston University and other places

Since the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, East Asia has gone from having virtually no regional financial cooperation to having multiple cooperative arrangements. This article focuses on the issue area of emergency liquidity provision, where global (International Monetary Fund), regional (Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization), and bilateral arrangements co-exist and overlap in complicated ways, forming a regime complex. While the overall system offers more options and greater funding than were available in 1997, it also raises questions about how those levels will operate in a crisis. This article shows how national preferences of likely creditor and likely borrower countries have interacted to create the current regime complex, as well as the political compromises and remaining uncertainties about how they will work together. It argues that the evolution and current shape of the regime complex have been driven by the efforts of key states to take advantage of or thwart power asymmetries.

Financial liberalization has noticeably reduced the role of the state in effectively influencing the economy in post-developmental states. Yet many studies have found that the legacies of the developmental model continue to influence the policies, institutions, and socioeconomic challenges that are faced by the states that previously adopted the model. These studies, however, do not clearly identify when and how such legacies may be manifested in state behavior. This paper contributes to filling this gap in the literature by arguing that financial crises can serve as a trigger to more clearly reveal the structural evidence of the legacy in institutions that were previously established and utilized for developmental objectives. By conducting a rigorous case analysis using historical and market data on the crisis responses of South Korea’s public pension fund, this paper finds that South Korea’s developmental legacy remains passively embedded in the governance structure of the pension fund in non-crisis times but manifests during financial crises.

A Region of Regimes is an ambitious book, which seeks to provide an overarching analysis of the East Asian economic and institutional development. It examines the political economies of ten varied countries, relates them to the regional order, and covers a time span of 75 years from the end of World War Two through the Trump presidency. I expect that it will leave every reader pondering its arguments for a long time. The core of the book is an examination of regime types among the countries of Northeast and Southeast Asia. At the country level, Pempel defines ‘regimes’ as a characterization of ‘the interactions among… common political, socioeconomic, and international properties.’ (p. 2). He builds on extended traditions in the study of comparative politics, many of which he has helped to define, including theorizing on the developmental state, one-party-dominant democracies, and corporatism. He offers three main categories of regime in the region: ‘Developmental’ (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan), ‘Ersatz Developmental’ (Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand), and ‘Rapacious Regimes’ (the Philippines, North Korea, and Myanmar). He also devotes a chapter to China, which he categorizes as a ‘Composite’ regime that has characteristics that overlap with each of his ideal-types. To facilitate comparison among the regime types, each chapter on domestic regimes is broken down into analyses of state institutions, socioeconomic forces, and external forces, which in turn link to distinctive economic policy paradigms. He closes with a chapter on the regional order.

This chapter presents a comparative analysis of the background, governance and economic impacts of two existing short-term liquidity mechanisms, the Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization (CMIM) and the Latin American Reserve Fund (referred to by its better-known Spanish acronym, FLAR—Fondo Latinoamericano de Reservas). We find that the structures of regional financial institutions as well as the amount of resources available to member countries are contingent on regional dynamics, the economic characteristics of members and members’ reluctance to approach the IMF for short-term balance-of-payments support. This study offers an up-to-date assessment of the two RFAs, based primarily on on-site interviews with their respective staff members, regional government and central bank officials, and scholars. Those interviews, conducted in 2016, revealed how, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, RFAs advanced efforts to improve their internal research capacity, develop strategic alliances and increase the resources available to their members.

In the wake of the Asian Financial Crisis, East Asia’s efforts to enhance regional financial cooperation raised the possibility of East Asia playing a more assertive role in global financial governance. However, despite the region’s increased voice in governance and economic weight, East Asian financial systems and markets have mostly adapted to global norms developed in New York, London, and Washington, DC. We argue that the failure of East Asia to push an alternative vision of financial governance reflects both the lack of regional political unity and, more crucially, the divisions of interests both between and within key East Asian economies. Despite nearly universal regional dissatisfaction with global standards and institutions in the wake of the Asian Financial Crisis, these two factors have combined to prevent the development of a distinctive regional model that could be promoted at the global level.

Since the 1997 Asian financial crisis, East Asia’s ASEAN +3 states have built the second-largest regional emergency liquidity fund in the world, the Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization ( CMIM ). With a total commitment of $ 240 billion to aid member states facing a currency crisis, CMIM can provide more funds to members than the International Monetary Fund ( IMF ). Nonetheless, CMIM continues to be functionally subordinate to IMF decisions. This may now be changing following the 2011 creation of the ASEAN +3 Macroeconomic Research Office ( AMRO ) as a regional mechanism to manage surveillance and design of CMIM lending programs. The ability to delegate surveillance and program design to an independent body is a crucial prerequisite to ending CMIM ’s subordination to the IMF , and AMRO seeks to ensure such autonomy through its institutional design. This article analyzes AMRO ’s progress toward autonomy, using indicators of effective delegation drawn from organizational theory and newly available information and data on AMRO .

Remittances to developing economies constitute one of their most important and consistent forms of capital inflow, but have long been limited by costs and risks associated with trans-border payments. New digital platforms lower these, with significant implications for financial inclusion and economic development. Constituting an important element of developing countries’ engagement with international finance, remittances engender new opportunities for empowerment and vulnerability. This article analyzes recent developments in international remittances to developing countries through the lens of infrastructure. The infrastructural perspective reveals important junction points between diverse money transfer pathways and institutions, depicting their spatial configuration and relationality as well as their potential to affect power differentials, and allowing for a socially embedded view of digital disruption. Drawing on examples in Africa and Asia, we show that the new generation of remittance infrastructures are best understood as assemblages of multiple elements, conjoining monopolistic trunks that depend on local innovations to traverse the ‘last mile’ to reach end-users. The vibrancy and indispensability of local networks and innovation, along with competition among core platforms, allow for significant agency and economic opportunity even among communities beset by poverty.

This article examines the impact of regional financial arrangements (RFAs) on the global liquidity regime. It argues that the design of RFAs could potentially alter the global regime, whether by strengthening it and making it more coherent or by decentring the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and destabilizing it. To determine possible outcomes, this analysis deploys a ‘middle‐up’ approach that focuses on the institutional design of these RFAs. It first draws on the rational design of institutions framework to identify the internal characteristics of RFAs that are most relevant to their capabilities and capacities. It then applies these insights to the interactions of RFAs with the IMF, building on Aggarwal's (1998) concept of ‘nested’ versus ‘parallel’ institutions, to create an analytical lens through which to assess the nature and sustainability of nested linkages. Through an analysis of the Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization (CMIM) and the Latin American Reserve Fund (FLAR), the article demonstrates the usefulness of this lens. It concludes by considering three circumstances in which fault lines created by these RFAs’ institutional design could be activated, permitting an institution to ‘leave the nest’, including changing intentions of principals, creation of parallel capabilities and facilities, and failure of the global regime to address regional needs in a crisis.

Since new distributed ledger technologies hold out a promise to restructure cross‐border flows of people and material resources, they affect globalization and alter transnational spaces. Their capacity to facilitate secure and disintermediated value transfer through crypto‐code and smart contracts enables novel forms of remittance transfer, resource management and digital identity verification – and may also generate new vulnerabilities. In this article, we examine the use of emerging blockchain applications in various migration and diaspora related initiatives in the emerging economies of Africa, Asia and Europe. By building on existing social networks of mutual obligation and quasi‐ethnic affinities, blockchain technologies may facilitate the ability to enlarge the scope of diasporas and change the nature of belonging, sovereignty, migration and statehood. Through exploring the selective foregrounding of mutuality and materiality in such alternative value transfer systems, we seek to explain the dynamics of trust and agency that these networks generate to extend commitments and loyalties in the transnational space.