Research Seminar: Grimes on Financial Cooperation in East Asia
William Grimes, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of International Relations and Political Science at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, gave a talk as part of the Pardee School Research Seminar Series on September 12, 2018.
Grimes delivered a presentation entitled “Institutionalizing Financial Cooperation in East Asia.” The talk was hosted with the Research in Comparative Politics Workshop series run by the Pardee School and the BU Department of Political Science.
Grimes focused on the Chiang Mai Initiative, the multilateral currency swap arrangement among the ten members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the People’s Republic of China (including Hong Kong), Japan, and South Korea. He also discussed the effectiveness of AMRO, the regional macroeconomic surveillance unit of the Chiang Mai Initiative.
According to Grimes, his research examines whether it’s possible to divorce regional surveillance from regional power, whether regional surveillance is better than or different from IMF surveillance and if greater AMRO capacity would lead to greater credibility for the Chiang Mai Initiative.
Grimes, who has taught at Boston University since 1996, is a leading scholar of East Asian financial regionalism. His 2008 book Currency and Contest in East Asia: The Great Power Politics of Financial Regionalism won the 2010 Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize and received Honorable Mention for the 2009 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award. More recently, in conjunction with the Pardee School’s Global Economic Governance Initiative, he led a research project for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) to develop a guide to best practices for regional liquidity arrangements.
The Pardee School Research Seminar Series is a forum for faculty and students to discuss and receive feedback on ongoing research. The series is a mix of presentations, works-in-progress sessions, and research workshops. Faculty and students based at BU and elsewhere are invited to present and attend the Research Seminar Series. Anyone interested in presenting should send an e-mail with name, affiliation, and a presentation description, with “Pardee Seminar” in the subject line, to: Mahesh Karra.