A Roadmap of Monetary Cooperation in East Asia: Some Lessons from the European Experience = A Roadmap of Monetary Cooperation in East Asia: Some Lessons from the European Experience

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Finance ministers of Korea, China and Japan announced recently that they would take steps to introduce a common currency in East Asia. This news makes one to suspect that the monetary cooperation will become an important policy agenda in East Asia. This paper provides a reflection on the necessity, feasibility, and modality of East Asia`s monetary cooperation process. The paper starts with some preliminary but fundamental questions about monetary cooperation in East Asia. It is argued that, despite a number of obstacles, the time is ripe to pursue the monetary integration in East Asia. This paper proceeds to propose a roadmap of monetary cooperation in East Asia, from a loose cooperative stage with many symbolic actions and weak political commitment to the introduction of more formal and constraining institutions requiring stronger political commitment. The European experience provides a lot of lessons to East Asia`s monetary integration through its success and failure stories as well.