Financial Liberalization: Managing Risks and Opportunities

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The past two decades have seen the growing financial liberalization and integration of the countries in the Asia-Pacific region and the rest of the world. This development reflects the complementarities among trade, direct investment and finance in the dynamics of outward-oriented growth in East Asia. However, the recent East Asian financial crisis shows forcefully that economic openness and financial integration has risks as much as opportunities. This volume, which is co-published with the Philippine APEC Study Center Network (PASCN), is a collection of seven studies that focus interrelated aspects of the structural and institutional foundations of effective risk management and exploitation of opportunities in an open economy. It also draws lessons from and insights on macroeconomic management in an open economy; the liberalization of the banking industry; the human resource implications of financial liberalization and integration; and the behavior of APEC member-economies toward the financial services agreement under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS).