Yaechan Lee’s research while affiliated with Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific 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.

This article examines how South Korea has used the ASEAN Plus security platforms to hedge between the US and China and why it has not participated in the FOIP strategy. It argues that the platforms’ neutral guise, owing to ASEAN centrality and their global norms-based agenda has allowed Korea to passively voice its alignment with the US, thereby answering to the pressure for a higher commitment from the US and clearing the political risk of linking the alignment decision to its own views. It asserts, therefore, that access to effective multilateral security platforms allows higher leverage to the weaker ally in an asymmetric alliance relationship.