Toward Developing Regional Bond Markets in East Asia

Creating regional bond markets in East Asia has emerged as an important policy topic in discussions of how to promote regional monetary and financial cooperation to prevent future crises in the region. We evaluate the rationale and the strategies and propose a road map for developing regional bond markets in East Asia. We propose a market-oriented approach to development of the regional bond markets with the role of the official sector limited to such activities as building the regional financial infrastructure. We also suggest that the eventual goal of regional bond market development should be the development of domestic bond markets in the region. If domestic bond markets are fortified by domestic financial infrastructure and are deregulated and opened to foreign borrowers and investors, many of the Asian countries will be able to mitigate maturity and currency mismatch problems. Copyright (c) 2005 The Earth Institute at Columbia University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.