HAS INTERNATIONAL CAPITAL MOBILITY INCREASED IN ASIA? EVIDENCE FROM THE POST-1997 FINANCIAL CRISIS PERIOD

Abstract

This paper examines whether international capital mobility in Asia has increased after the 1997 Asian financial crisis by estimating the Feldstein-Horioka (FH) coefficients using panel cointegration and dynamic OLS regressions. In the benchmark estimation, we find that the FH coefficients of ten Asian economies decrease significantly from 0.65 during the pre-crisis period to 0.32 during the post-crisis period. Furthermore, the coefficient for the post-crisis period is less statistically significant than that for the pre-crisis period. The extended model estimations with additional control variables controlling for the business cycle, different foreign exchange rate systems, and capital control also show the results which are consistent with the benchmark estimation results. Rolling regressions show a consistently declining trend of the FH coefficients in Asia during our sample period. These results provide consistent evidence, according to the FH proposition, of increasing international capital mobility in Asia during the post-1997 Asian financial crisis period. (JEL F36, F37, F21)