Beyond decoupling and recoupling: financial cooperation in East Asia

Date

2024-8

Author

Ay, Batuhan

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Financial cooperation within East Asia has been a relatively novel development. It began to improve after the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997, while the 2008 Global Financial Crisis saw the further enhancement of this cooperation process. This exploratory study analyzes the literature on regional financial cooperation in East Asia. It argues that the literature mainly explores the financial cooperation process in the region via conceptions such as decoupling/recoupling and/or exclusion/inclusion. This line of thinking has an inherent merit on determining the level of intra-regional and inter-regional interconnectedness. However, as it will be argued, such dichotomies also fix the identities of East Asia to what is regional, and the identity of the West to what is global. This brings the understanding that the former can only reproduce itself as a regional phenomenon while the latter can assume a global position. To elaborate on this argument, this thesis focuses on the role of Japan in the early steps towards regional financial cooperation after the Asian Financial Crisis, and the increased role of China after the Global Financial Crisis, as two significant powers of the region whose influence goes beyond the region. Problematizing the growing influence of China in the global financial governance as China pushes for the internationalization of Renminbi, has made a novel Chinese-led institution named Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank, and increases its position in the decision-making procedures of the International Monetary Fund, the thesis will argue that these financial initiatives make China a global actor who can reproduce itself in the global sphere. Hence, financial developments in the region need to be analyzed via theoretical approaches that question the issue beyond the decoupling/recoupling problematic.

Subject Keywords

Financial cooperation, Decoupling/recoupling, Regionalism

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/110874

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis