Franziska Ohnsorge

Minsuk Kim

Mrs. Vanessa Le Lesle

Srikant Seshadri

There is much speculation regarding a “race for dominance” among financial centers in Asia, arising from the anticipated financial opening up of China. This frame of reference is, to an extent, a predilection that results from a traditional understanding of financial centers as possessing historical, geographic, and scale economy advantages. This paper, however, suggests that there is an alternative prism through which the evolution of financial centers in Asia needs to be viewed. It underscores the importance of “complementarity” rather than “dominance” to better serve regional and global financial stability. We posit that such complementarity is vital, through network analysis of the roles of Hong Kong SAR and Singapore as the current leading financial centers in the region. This analysis suggests that a competition for dominance can result in de-stabilizing levels of interconnectivity that render the global “network” as a whole more susceptible to rapid propagation of shocks. We then examine the regulatory and policy challenges that may be encountered in furthering such complementary coexistence.

Why Complementarity Matters for Stability—Hong Kong SAR and Singapore as Asian Financial Centers

This paper examines how financial development influences the debt dollarization of nonfinancial firms in a sample of emerging market economies (EMEs). The macroeconomic channels are identified from an optimal portfolio allocation model and assessed empirically using the accounting information of nonfinancial firms from 21 EMEs during 2009–2017. The results show that financial development, measured by the private credit-to-GDP ratio, mainly reduces the influence of exchange rate volatility in determining a firm's debt currency composition, among other channels. Furthermore, the effect of exchange rate volatility becomes statistically insignificant beyond an estimated threshold credit-to-GDP ratio of 100 percent.

Minsuk Kim

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