We use data on the extent to which residents of one country hold the bonds of issuers resident in another as a measure of financial integration or interrelatedness, asking how Asia compares with Europe and Latin America and with the base case in which the purchaser and issuer of the bonds reside in different regions. Not surprisingly, we find that Europe is head and shoulders above other regions in terms of financial integration. More interesting is that Asia already seems to have made some progress on this front compared to Latin America and other parts of the world. The contrast with Latin America is largely explained by stronger creditor and investor rights, more expeditious and less costly contract enforcement, and greater transparency that lead to larger and better developed financial systems in Asia, something that is conducive to foreign participation in local markets and to intra-regional cross holdings of Asian bonds generally. Further results based on a limited sample suggest that one factor holding back investment in foreign bonds in East Asia may be limited geographical diversification by mutual funds, in turn reflecting a dearth of appropriate assets. Asian Bond Fund 2, by creating a passively managed portfolio of local currency bonds potentially attractive to mutual fund managers and investors, may help to relax this constraint.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
12408.
Length: Date of creation: Aug 2006 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:12408
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Barry Eichengreen & Pipat Luengnaruemitchai, 2006.
"Why doesn’t Asia have bigger bond markets?,"
BIS Papers chapters,
in: Bank for International Settlements (ed.), Asian bond markets: issues and prospects, volume 30, pages 40-77
Bank for International Settlements.
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Simeon Djankov & Caralee McLiesh & Andrei Shleifer, 2005.
"Private Credit in 129 Countries,"
NBER Working Papers
11078, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
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