Convergence, business cycles, economic growth and financial markets in Asia Pacific

Abstract

"'A careful reading of the thesis title Convergence, Business Cycles, Economic Growth and Financial Markets in Asia Pacific may give the impression of a very heterogeneous collection of topics. Already the different time horizons behind the single economic analyses clarify this wide variety: Both convergence and growth characterise dynamic processes in the long run, which may take years or just as well decades. In contrast, business cycles represent a regularly recurring phenomenon changing within months. At last, the adjustment to innovations in the financial market takes place on a daily or even shorter basis. Eventually, this separation remains purely artificial, since the economic achievements especially of the Asian Pacific region are determined by the interaction of all these different factors. A prime example for this argumentation in the negative sense has been the Asian financial crisis in 1997/98: In the beginning, an overall vulnerable economic environment could not withstand a speculative attack on the Thai baht, which ran into landmark depreciation. Contagion effects then tore through the regional financial markets, thereby destabilising the confidence built in decades of systematic development. Capital flight and recessive investment turned the financial into an economic crisis, hitting severely the real sector of many South-East Asian countries. Especially unstable but high-performing nations as Malaysia and Thailand were set back years in their development process. However, the Asian financial crisis as a striking example should not put the extraordinary dynamic growth process in the shade. Economies like Taiwan, South Korea or Singapore, which had hardly exceeded the state of developing countries in the 1970s, nowadays belong to the highly industrialised world. In stark contrast, for example Indonesia and the Philippines may have picked up certain foreign growth impulses, but did not realise the industrial take-off until the present time. - This paper addresses the question of macroeconomic integration in the Asian Pacific region. Economically, the analysis is based on the notions of stochastic long-run convergence and business cycle coherence. The econometric procedure consists of tests for cointegration, the examination of vector error correction models, different variants of common cycle tests and forecast error variance decompositions. Results in favour of cyclical synchrony can be partly established, and are even exceeded by the broad evidence for equilibrium relations. In these domains, several leading countries are identified." (Text excerpt, IAB-Doku) ((en))

Cite article

Weber, E. (2007): Convergence, business cycles, economic growth and financial markets in Asia Pacific. Berlin, 107 p.