Taiwan, the Republic of China, has been striving to reform its financial system, and in the process, become a financial power, both regionally within the Pacific Rim of Asia, and, globally, given the rapidly increasing economic and financial significance of this area. In a unique book written from an interdisciplinary and well-balanced legal, financial and economics perspective that is both theoretical and practical, Semkow comprehensively analyzes and discusses the scope and direction financial and capital market reform has taken in Taiwan, and its implications for existing and newly emerging financial institutions in Taiwan and elsewhere.

Having introduced the problems underlying and the significance of Taiwanese financial reform, the author provides a thorough overview of the entire spectrum of existing and newly-emerging domestic and international financial institutions within Taiwan, and the various financial regulators, including the Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank of China, and the regulatory framework through which both financial institutions and regulators operate. The author examines in detail the various financial markets, including the financial, money, offshore banking, foreign exchange and securities (equity, debt and derivative) markets, and the major recent and imminent legislative and regulatory initiatives undertaken to reform these markets and elevate Taiwan's status as a regional, and by implication, a global financial center. This book will provide both foreign and Taiwanese financial, legal, business, and public policy and academic communities interested in Asian and Taiwanese business and finance an invaluable legal and financial guide to the rapidly emerging and increasing significance of Taiwanese banking and finance in this decade and into the next century.

The financial liberalization thesis emerged in the 1970s and has been of considerable importance ever since, not merely in terms of its theoretical influence but, perhaps more importantly, in terms of its impact on policy makers and policy debates. Although it has encountered increasing scepticism over the years, it nevertheless had a relatively early impact on development policy, which still continues unabated, through the work of the IMF and the World Bank. The latter two institutions, perhaps in their traditional role as promoters of what were claimed to be free market conditions, were keen to encourage financial liberalization policies as part of more general reforms or stabilization programmes. This book explores what we have learned from the vast experience of the theoretical and policy aspects of the financial liberalization.

Standard macroeconomic monographs often discuss the mechanism of monetary transmission, usually ending by highlighting the complexities and uncertainties involved in this mechanism. Conversely, The Preparation of Monetary Policy takes these uncertainties as a starting point, analytically investigating their nature and spelling out their consequences for the monetary policy maker. The second innovative aspect of this book is its focus on policy preparation instead of well-covered topics such as monetary policy strategy, tactics, and implementation. Thirdly, a general, multi-model framework for preparing monetary policy is proposed, which is illustrated by case studies stressing the role of international economic linkages and of expectations. Written in a self-contained fashion, these case studies are of interest by themselves. The book is written for an audience that is interested in the art and science of monetary policy making, which includes central bankers, academics, and (graduate) students in the field of monetary economics, macroeconomics, international economics and finance.

Understanding the New Global Economy: A European Perspective argues that globalisation is facing economic and political headwinds. A new global economic geography is emerging, cross-border relationships are changing, and global governance structures must come to terms with a new multipolar world. This book clarifies the fundamental questions and trade-offs in this new global economy, and gives readers the tools to understand contemporary debates. It presents a range of possible policy options, without being prescriptive. Following a modular structure, each chapter takes a similar approach but can also be read as a stand-alone piece. State-of-the-art academic research and historical experiences are weaved throughout the book, and readers are pointed towards relevant sources of information . This text is an accessible guide to the contemporary world economy, suited to students of international economics, political economy, globalisation, and European studies. It will also be valuable reading for researchers, professionals, and general readers interested in economics, politics, and civil society.

This timely collection presents an authoritative overview of one of the three key currencies of the second half of the twentieth century, the German Mark. Charles A.E.Goodhart reflects on the future of the Euro against the background of the success story of the Deutsche Mark. Hans Tietmeyer reviews the 50 years lifetime of the German Mark, pointing out that the Bundesbank will continue to have a say within the European Central Bank. In particular he emphasizes the vital part of the Deutsche Mark as cornerstone of the so-called Social Market Economy in postwar Germany.

Throughout the ages money was a prerogative of national sovereignty. Currency management was the responsibility of governments.;After World War 2 Bretton Woods provided the framework for intergovernmental monetary cooperation until, in the early seventies, the banking community, using the Eurodollar as an international medium of exchange, forced governments to adopt a regime of floating rates.;The book describes how, in the 1950s, through an improbable chain of events, Soviet-owned banks established in Paris and London spawned the Eurodollar market, which has come to dominate world finance.;The Euromarket has given rise to a new breed of financiers and currency traders who radically changed the nature of international banking. The book relates the collision between sovereign states and stateless economic forces, the struggle for supremacy between the political authorities and the international financial community, their strategies and tactics, their strengths and weaknesses.

This collection arises from the proceedings of a conference held in 2003 on the subject of the monetary theory of production. The contributors look at a number of issues including the tradition of the monetary theory of production; stocks and flows in the monetary circuit; unemployment; monetary distribution and monetary circuit and economic policy.

This book challenges the mainstream paradigm, which is based on the inter-temporal optimisation of welfare by individual agents. It introduces a new methodology for studying how it is institutions which create flows of income, expenditure and production together with stocks of assets (including money) and liabilities, thereby determining how whole economies evolve through time. Starting with extremely simple stock flow consistent (SFC) models, the text describes a succession of increasingly complex models. Solutions of these models are used to illustrate ways in which whole economies evolve when shocked in various ways. Readers will be able to download all the models and explore their properties for themselves. A major conclusion is that economies require management via fiscal and monetary policy if full employment without inflation is to be achieved.

The classical ARMA models have limitations when applied to the field of financial and monetary economics. Financial time series present nonlinear dynamic characteristics and the ARCH models offer a more adaptive framework for this type of problem. This book surveys the recent work in this area from the perspective of statistical theory, financial models, and applications and will be of interest to theorists and practitioners. From the view point of statistical theory, ARCH models may be considered as specific nonlinear time series models which allow for an exhaustive study of the underlying dynamics. It is possible to reexamine a number of classical questions such as the random walk hypothesis, prediction interval building, presence of latent variables etc., and to test the validity of the previously studied results. There are two main categories of potential applications. One is testing several economic or financial theories concerning the stocks, bonds, and currencies markets, or studying the links between the short and long run. The second is related to the interventions of the banks on the markets, such as choice of optimal portfolios, hedging portfolios, values at risk, and the size and times of block trading.

One of the most dramatic and least studied policy changes of the past twenty years is the increased use of indexing-automatic adjustments for inflation-in federal programs. Currently, programs comprising more than one-third of the federal budget have indexing provisions. The growth of indexing is all the more remarkable since it appears to conflict with the electoral interests of most politicians. Without indexing, legislators can vote for popular increases in social security benefits, federal pay, and other programs during election years and claim credit with their constituents for doing so. Indexing tends to keep such votes off the agenda. Why would politicians renounce these credit-claiming opportunities instead of embracing them? R. Kent Weaver examines the reasons for the growth of indexing in federal programs and its consequences for current policy. He focuses on indexing debates in six policy areas: social security, food stamps, congressional pay, dairy price supports, the minimum wage, and federal income tax brackets. Weaver argues that to understand indexation policy-and policymaking in general-we must broaden our understanding of policymakers' motivations. They have often given up opportunities to claim credit because they are even more concerned with avoiding blame for unpopular decisions and outcomes. Politicians' efforts to avoid blame for unpopular actions not only have determined whether indexing proposals were adopted, but have also shaped the effects of indexing on programs where it was adopted. Weaver shows that the effects of indexing have varied substantially across programs, and he suggests guidelines for the future use of indexing in federal programs.

The Evolution of Monetary Policy Strategies in Europe provides a comprehensive review of the advances in European monetary policy-making over the past decades. This book examines the considerations that determine a central bank's monetary strategy and explains how these considerations have featured in recent European monetary history. In so doing, it establishes what European monetary policy-makers have learned (or should have learned) and how they learned it. At the same time, Aerdt Houben maps out the rich monetary traditions that now flow together in the new-born Eurosystem and provides important insight into a prime influence on the system's decision-making, that is, the participating countries' past experiences. The book's distinctiveness lies in its sweeping coverage of policy developments in the individual central banks of the European Union, its penetrating analysis of the country-specific learning curves and its balanced assessment of the viability of alternative monetary policy strategies, including the strategy recently adopted by the Eurosystem. It combines theoretical insights with an in-depth empirical study of monetary policy design in Europe, highlighting the specific features that have contributed to policy success or failure. While the subject of monetary policy strategy (especially that of the Eurosystem) is currently very topical, the book's detailed information on how monetary policy has actually been implemented in each of the 15 European Union countries makes it a useful reference work with a long life-span.

On October 23 and 24, 1987, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis hosted its twelfth annual economic policy conference, "The U.S. Trade Deficit: Causes, Consequences, and Cures." This book contains the papers and comments delivered at that conference. A sharp decline in the value of the dollar against major foreign cur rencies began in March 1985 and continued through December 1987. Despite this decline, the U.S. trade deficit experienced considerable growth during this time. Many consider the simultaneous occurrence of these two events over so long a period to be a problem requiring a policy response. The conference addresses this issue. Various papers discuss the cause of the trade deficit, the reason for its size and persistence, its relation ship with other macroeconomic variables, its impact on other industrialized countries, and various policy proposals aimed at reducing the deficit. Session I Peter Hooper and Catherine L. Mann provide an analytical setting for the conference with their "The U.S. External Deficit: Its Causes and Persistence." Their observation that the unprecedentedly large U. S. trade imbalance is striking in both its size and its persistence could well be the subtitle of each of the papers presented. The macroeconomic studies, which Hooper and Mann summarize in their review of the existing literature, uniformly conclude that the deficit has not responded to fundamental macroeconomic determinants-relative U.S. income growth and the dollar's exchange rate-in the way that earlier, smaller U.S."

Originally published between 1951 and 1987, the 8 volumes in this set: Provide a wide-ranging and critical review of both first and second generation theories of inflation (and the related problem of unemployment), including the classical approach to macroeconomics. Examine how inflation as a policy has come about in modern democracies, how it works, how to avoid it and at what cost Reassess the strengths and weaknesses of incomes policies Examine pay control policies in major Western economies and survey developments from 1945, explore the aims of pay policies and discusse the problems of implementation, comparing the different kinds of policies.

Privatising firms and liberalizing their market environment generates in Eastern Europe a variety of problems, many of which are not common to the analogous attempts in industries countries. A first difference between the two experiences resides in establishing the value of the firm or of the assets that are being privatized. A second main difference concerns the lack of the record of market performance for the firm. The book explores these open questions through an overview of on-going and proposed processes in Section 1. In Section 2 theoretical foundations of privatization processes are proposed with respect to the financial market, industrial relations and foreign trade. A final key question is faced in Section 3: 'is there any alternative to privatization?'

The chapters in this book are based on papers prepared for a conference organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, held at the bank September 23-25, 1987, to review and compare monetary policy experiences of Pacific Basin countries during the past 15 years. The theme of the conference was conceived with two purposes in mind. First, there was (and still is) a great need to enhance knowledge on the workings of economies in the Pacific Basin, which has been the fastest growing region in the world economy during the past 30 years. While much has been written on Pacific Basin trade and economic growth, relatively few studies have been published on the conduct of monetary policy in these economies. Second, as we in the United States and others elsewhere have learned, rapid financial market changes over the last 15 years have led to considerable adjustment in the conduct of monetary policy. A comparative study of various national experiences can yield insights into the inter actions between monetary policy and financial market changes more than is obtainable by examining indi vidual national experiences separately."

Nominal yields on government debt in several countries have fallen very near their zero lower bound (ZLB), causing a liquidity trap and limiting the capacity to stimulate economic growth. This book provides a comprehensive reference to ZLB structure modeling in an applied setting.

The objective of this present volume is to analyse the response to the developments and the consequences for the conduct of monetary policy in five industrial countries. Also considered is the stability of hitherto established relationships between economic variables on which the reliability of monetary policy measures depends. The volume further covers some of the international aspects involved and the important implications of the emerging dominant and persistent flows of long-term capital across the exchanges.

Are foreign exchange markets efficient? Are fundamentals important for predicting exchange rate movements? What is the signal-to-ratio of high frequency exchange rate changes? Is it possible to define a measure of the equilibrium exchange rate that is useful from an assessment perspective? The book is a selective survey of current thinking on key topics in exchange rate economics, supplemented throughout by new empirical evidence. The focus is on the use of advanced econometric tools to find answers to these and other questions which are important to practitioners, policy-makers and academic economists. In addition, the book addresses more technical econometric considerations such as the importance of the choice between single-equation and system-wide approaches to modelling the exchange rate, and the reduced form versus structural equation problems. Readers will gain both a comprehensive overview of the way macroeconomists approach exchange rate modelling, and an understanding of how advanced techniques can help them explain and predict the behavior of this crucial economic variable.

As we tour the 400 year history of capitalism through its various phases of development, financial system instability is always there lurking in the shadows. The historical record attests that the processes of aggregating capital for real investment are inescapably vulnerable to risk, manic speculation, unserviceable debt, and crises; and with each episode of instability, a trail of devastation follows. Economic historians such as Hyman Minsky, Charles Kindleberger and others have studied this history and have exposed certain boom-bust patterns that have a way of stubbornly repeating themselves. This book posits that the large-scale financial crises that the world has experienced over the last 30 years are more or less the latest segments in this narrative, but with some distinct characteristics. In the period spanning the stock market crash of 1987 to the banking crisis of 2008 and its aftermath - the Greenspan Era - there were key institutional and ideological developments rooted in contemporary neoliberalism that have reshaped the historic rise-and-fall patterns to become more severe and widespread. In this important volume, Magnuson suggests the next episode will be a massive financial cyclone that will send us all tumbling toward a perilous future.

This book investigates issues of policy design in open economics. The performance of simple alternative policy rules is analysed in the context of theoretical models using both analytical solutions and numerical simulation techniques. One of the substantive contributions of the research is that policy evaluation should take into account, among other things, the implications of different rules for foreign wealth and the exchange rate. Hence the open economy models presented in the book include wealth effects and the current account. The evaluation of the alternative policy proposals is carried out within the framework of a "small" individual country and in the broader context of policy coordination. This book should be of interest to economics departments.

Hong Kong SAR is now highly unusual as a large economy running a currency board system that pegs the Hong Kong Dollar to the US Dollar. While usually credited with providing stability and prosperity for Hong Kong, the system has become controversial since the decline of the US Dollar since 2002 and the adoption of a flexible basket peg system for the Renminbi in 2005. Why was this system adopted in the first place? Why did Hong Kong go back to a currency board in 1983 after a decade of floating exchange rates? This volume explores the origins and persistence of the system in the context of the long term monetary integration with mainland China and presents the viewpoint of several of those involved in the restoration of the currency board system in 1983. It also explains the changes made since the 1990s and looks to Hong Kong's future prospects.

This book analyzes the revenues from the creation of currency by a central government. Adopting an institutional perspective, it develops a general theory of seigniorage by identifying three monetary regimes in economic history and the history of economic thought: a commodity currency, a fiat currency and a credit currency regime. As such it provides a modern analytical framework to analyze the nature of revenues from the creation of currency and their optimal height, whether currency is issued by means of minting coins, by printing and spending paper notes, by crediting private entities, or combinations thereof. The results of this analysis stretch beyond the immediate topic. The book establishes a relationship between the theory of seigniorage and government debt, the theory of the interest rate, the optimal rate of inflation, or the effectiveness and inflationary limits of outright monetary transactions.

This book describes the complex of economic processes which sustains inflationary pressure in nations with severe inflation problems. Paul Beckerman uses an innovative approach to study the strategies inhabitants of economies with lengthy inflation experience use to maintain their purchasing power despite inflation. He examines how these tactics function as 'feedback mechanisms', economic processes by which inflation in any given time period generates inflationary pressure in subsequent periods, and how they complicate the efforts of policy-makers to achieve stabilization.