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The Chiang Mai Initiative and Its Multilateralization:
Toward an Asian Monetary Fund?

YOUNGWON CHO
[St. Francis Xavier University]

Abstract:
As a regional self-help system of liquidity support established in the aftermath of the Asian crisis of 1997, the Chiang Mai Initiative (CMI) and its recent multilateralization have been touted in some quarters as important achievements in a region where institutionalized financial cooperation had been sorely lacking, taking East Asia one step closer to the resuscitation of the still-born Asian Monetary Fund. Against such a sanguine assessment, I argue that the significance of the CMI, even after its multilateralization, is largely limited to symbolism and its practical implications are inconsequential. Despite the progress associated with CMI multilateralization, the underlying political dynamics in the region render East Asia fundamentally incapable of producing a coherent regional solution to the recurring problem of global financial instability.

Keywords: Chiang Mai Initiative; Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization; East Asian regionalism; East Asian financial cooperation; Asian Monetary Fund 

In the fall of 1997, as East Asia was being swept up by an economic crisis of historical proportions, the Japanese Ministry of Finance proposed a regional mechanism of financial stabilization as a „made-in-Asia” solution for the problem of financial volatility plaguing the region. Dubbed as the „Asian Monetary Fund” (AMF), the new regional institution would be capitalized by a fund of up to $100 billion, half of it coming from the Japanese, to provide large-scale liquidity relief to crisis-stricken countries. Almost as soon as it was proposed, however, the initiative ran into insurmountable obstacles, facing intense political opposition from three key actors: the US, which saw the AMF as a menace to its influence in the region; China, which was disinclined to countenance what it perceived to be Japan’s attempt to establish regional economic hegemony; and the IMF, which for organizational and bureaucratic reasons also feared the AMF for its possible displacement of the Fund’s role in the region.¹ As a result, the AMF proposal suffered an early demise and was quickly shoved aside for the US-dominated IMF to determine the course of events in the region.

Despite the failure of the AMF initiative, the underlying idea of a regional liquidity support mechanism itself never went away. On the contrary, it was fuelled even more by the draconian measures imposed by the IMF and the widespread resentment this generated in the region.² Riding this wave of discontent, East Asia’s attempt to find a regional alternative to the IMF was revived in 2000 in another institutional form called the Chiang Mai Initiative (CMI). Unveiled at the ASEAN plus 3 (APT) Finance Ministers’ Meeting in Thailand, the CMI initially began as a series of modest bilateral swap agreements (BSAs) among the participating central banks of the APT. Over the course of the following decade, however, it has seen significant expansion, both in terms of the amount of resources disposable through it and the scope of its activities. In particular, its multilateralization in 2010 has transformed it from a simple network of BSAs into a „self-managed reserve pooling” arrangement governed with a single contractual agreement and accompanied by a number of new provisions strengthening its capacity. Hailed as a milestone event by its supporters, CMI multilateralization (CMIM) is said to have taken the region one step closer to resurrecting the AMF.³

Such an optimistic assessment is without basis. While the CMIM does take East Asia one step closer to the AMF, it is only a very small step and the distance between the CMIM and the AMF remains miles apart. In its current form, the CMIM does not give its participants what they are craving for: a credible regional source of temporary liquidity relief in the event of destabilizing shocks in capital flows, one that comes without the onerous strings that were attached to the IMF rescue packages in 1997. Moving the CMIM toward a genuinely regional self-help system requires delinking its disbursements from the IMF, and this in turn requires a robust surveillance and enforcement mechanism of its own. The latter’s political implications are sufficiently unpalatable to the relevant actors to dampen their enthusiasm for further strengthening of the CMIM, and, accordingly, the significance of the CMI and its multilateralization is confined to mere symbolism, while its practical implications remain largely inconsequential.

The Origins and Evolution of the CMI

Two fundamental motivations have sustained East Asia’s drive for closer regional financial cooperation. One motivation is the regional actors’ economic need to better manage financial globalization by making themselves less vulnerable to the volatility of the global financial system; the other motivation, which is political, is their desire to achieve this without having to turn to extra-regional institutions and actors, namely the IMF and the US.⁴ Both motivations are derived from their collective experience during the Asian crisis of 1997 that taught three costly lessons.

First, the crisis demonstrated clearly to East Asian countries that, with the advent of financial globalization, the resources disposable to individual countries were far too insufficient to withstand the forces of global financial markets. From Thailand to Indonesia and South Korea, the crisis-stricken countries discovered that once the tidal wave of capital flows reversed its direction, their individual reserve holdings gave them no reprieve from massive capital exodus and intense speculative attacks. Second, the Asian crisis also revealed that while financial markets were prone to highly contagious panic, governments in the region were incapable of coming up with a collective response to confront the problem of contagion. Bereft of such a regional option, the only venue left for them was the IMF. Third, the crisis taught what everyone except perhaps the most naïve observer of the IMF had known all along – that, notwithstanding its self-portrayal as a politically neutral, benevolent hand, the IMF represents, first and foremost, the interests of its major shareholders. This revelation goes beyond the many critiques that the Fund faced regarding its draconian stabilization measures.⁵ Apart from this, the structural adjustment side of the Fund’s program invariably required far-ranging market opening, in line with former US Trade Representative Mickey Kantor’s view that the US, as the largest shareholder and the only veto-yielding member of the IMF, should use the Fund as „a battering ram” to advance its own interests.⁶

Born out of these bitter lessons of the Asian crisis, but having also been preceded by the ill-fated AMF, the CMI was launched as a second-best arrangement that, as described by then Japanese Finance Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, was „of the same philosophy as the AMF.”⁷ However, to avoid eliciting hostile opposition from the US and the IMF while mollifying the Chinese suspicion of Japan’s ulterior motive, the CMI came in a drastically diluted form, as a bare-bone arrangement composed of a simple network of BSAs totalling $36.5 billion initially. Moreover, even this relatively modest sum could not be tapped fully unless the requesting country first concluded an agreement with the IMF. This „IMF link” restricted the participating countries’ free access to CMI funding to only 10% of their BSAs, and any amount beyond this required the vetting of the Fund. There was also an opt-out clause that made the activation of the BSAs contingent on the willingness of the potential lenders, which made the agreement ultimately unenforceable. Nor was there a viable surveillance mechanism, crucial to address the problem of moral hazard lurking around any liquidity assistance scheme. An ill-defined process called Economic Review and Policy Dialogue (ERPD) emerged as the only surveillance venue, involving informal exchange of information, vague policy dialogue, and non-binding peer reviews without any enforcement mechanism.

One accomplishment the CMI did make, however, was the exclusion of the US. Yet, unlike the AMF proposal, the CMI was not opposed by Washington. That the US did not throw in a road block to the CMI despite its exclusion was not an indicator of a more receptive Washington, but of the sheer distance by which the CMI fell short of fulfilling the vision set out in the AMF proposal. The CMI was so watered down that it posed no threat to US interests in the region, and thus the US saw no need to oppose it. In particular, the restrictive link that tied 90% of the CMI’s funding to the vetting of the IMF meant that while the US was formally kept out of the arrangement, it was not left out of the loop.

In response to these initial limitations, the APT took a series of additional steps to narrow the gap between the rhetoric and the reality. These included expanding the size of the BSAs several times to eventually reach a total of around $90 billion in 2009; increasing the amount of BSAs disposable without the IMF ‘s approval to 20% in May 2005; incorporating the ERPD into the CMI framework in the same year and making any release of fund conditional on participation in the ERPD process; and adopting a collective decision-making procedure for the CMI activation as an initial step toward eventual multilateralization of the CMI.⁸ None of these steps, however, made the CMI any more credible. The attempt to strengthen the surveillance capacity of the APT produced little tangible results, while the increase in the size of the BSAs still fell far short of coming anywhere close to an adequate level. And despite the doubling of the amount of „freely” available financing through the CMI, the continuing placement of the IMF link still left 80% of the financing up to the tender mercy of the Fund.

The practical irrelevance of the CMI was exposed bare in the fall of 2008 when the near collapse of the US banking industry and its destabilizing effects on the global financial system presented a veritable testing ground for the CMI. With the US banking crisis reverberating around the world and making a particularly pernicious impact on emerging markets, a number of potential borrower countries in East Asia saw a huge surge in capital outflows, intense pressure on their currencies, and rapidly dwindling foreign exchange reserves that signalled an impending crisis of liquidity. East Asia in the fall of 2008 was starring at a potential recurrence of the crisis of 1997, precisely the scenario for which the CMI had been established. Yet, no country actually drew from the CMI. In fact, rather than turning to the CMI, APT members chose to rely on their own measures by continuing to run down their large reserve holdings, and, when this proved to be insufficient as in the case of South Korea, turned to the US for assistance, opening and activating a bilateral swap agreement with the US Federal Reserve Board.⁹

The Multilateralization of the CMI: Still Not Enough

With the limits of the CMI exposed by the events of the 2008 global financial crisis, the APT moved quickly to patch the gaping hole by concluding an agreement to multilateralize the CMI, an ambitious goal long sought after by the advocates of greater regional financial cooperation. Commitments to multilateralization had been made in principle as early as 2005, but the actual progress toward it had been bogged down over the specific elements of implementation. The bone of contention was essentially between China and Japan over quota allocations, with neither side willing to let the other assume the leadership mantle in the CMIM. On the one hand, Japan insisted that it should be the largest contributor to the CMIM, on the basis of the fact that that their economy was then the largest in the region and their contribution under the CMI was also the largest. China found this unacceptable – hardly surprising given its earlier rejection of the Japanese-led AMF – and maintained that its share should be at least equal to that of Japan, given the fact that China was the largest holder of foreign currency reserves in the world and its economy was on a clear trajectory to overtake the Japanese economy soon, as it in fact did in 2010.¹⁰

Hastened in no small part by the financial upheaval unleashed by the US banking crisis, the two countries came to resolve their difference in a rather ingenious compromise that satisfied both. As it wished, Japan did receive the largest contribution quota at 32% of the total pool. China’s share, on the other hand, was set at 28.5%, but this was padded up by the addition of Hong Kong as a new participant, which was given a share of 3.5% to boost the overall share of Chinese contribution to 32%, exactly the same as the Japanese share. With the biggest obstacle to multilateralization removed by this sleight-of-hand maneouver, the APT unveiled the basic contours of the CMIM at its 2009 Finance Ministers’ Meeting in Bali, Indonesia, and the arrangement came into effect in March of the following year with some minor modifications. Aside from creating a self-managed reserve pool, multilateralization has increased the size of the fund from $90 to $120 billion and expanded the number of participants as well to include all members of ASEAN, bringing CMIM membership in line with APT membership. The five smaller countries that had previously not participated in the CMI (Brunei, Cambodia, Lao, Myanmar and Vietnam) are now part of the reserve pool.

The CMIM’s modality over contribution shares, borrowing quotas, and voting weight closely mirrors that of the IMF (see table 1). The overall ratio of contributions between ASEAN and Plus 3 countries are set at 2:8, with the latter committing $96 billion and the rest coming from the ASEAN members. Reflecting different likelihood of and vulnerability to a liquidity crisis among the participating members, borrowing quotas are set as multiples of contributions in an inverse relationship to their size, giving ASEAN members higher purchasing multiples, South Korea at parity, and China and Japan half their quotas. The weighted voting system is based on quota contributions, much as is the case at the IMF, and decision-making follows a two-tier system. At the ministerial level consisting of APT finance ministers, a consensus approval is required to decide on „fundamental issues” such as the review of the total size of CMIM, contribution, and borrowing multiples, as well as readmission, membership, and terms of lending. „Executive level issues” including initial execution of drawing, renewal, and default are determined by 2/3 majority at the deputy-level, comprised of deputy-representatives from the APT’s finance ministries and central banks.¹¹

In addition, the APT has also sought to address the perennial problem surrounding its lack of credible surveillance capacity by further enhancing the ERPD process and, more importantly, creating an independent regional macroeconomic surveillance unit called the ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Surveillance Office (AMRO). To be located in Singapore and begin operating sometime in 2011, AMRO is „to monitor and analyze regional economies, which contributes to the early detection of risks, swift implementation of remedial actions, and effective decision-making of the CMIM.”¹²

All of these changes improve upon the previous CMI. Despite this progress, however, the CMIM is fundamentally no different from its predecessor in its inability to satisfy the two core motivations that have sustained East Asia’s decade-long drive toward greater regional financial cooperation: it answers neither the economic desire for „self-help and support mechanisms” nor the political desire to attain them on an exclusively regional basis.

While $120 billion is a large number, it is nonetheless dwarfed by the massive size of foreign exchange reserves collectively held by the APT countries. East Asian countries have been accumulating huge amounts of reserves since the crisis of 1997 as a precautionary measure to insure themselves against the volatility of global financial markets. Next to the $5 trillion in foreign exchange reserves accumulated by the APT members, even $120 billion looks very small, accounting for only 2.4% of the total exchange reserves held by the participating economies of the CMIM. Individual contributions are also miniscule relative to each member’s reserve holdings, ranging from the low of 1.2% for China and the high of 8.4% for the Philippines (see table 2).

Table 1. CMIM Contributions, Borrowing Quotas, and Voting Weights

Source: APT, „Joint Ministerial Statement of the 13th ASEAN+3 Finance Ministers’ Meeting.”

Table 2. CMIM Contributions and Reserve Holdings of the APT, as of the End of 2010 (Billions of US$ Unless Otherwise Noted)

Source: IMF, International Financial Statistics; and APT, „Joint Ministerial Statement of the 13th ASEAN+3 Finance Ministers’ Meeting.” Data for Vietnam is as of the end of October 2010; for Brunei, November 2010; and for Lao, June 2010. No data is available for Myanmar.

More problematically, the actual size of the available funding for potential borrowers still falls far short of what would justify calling the CMIM a genuine regional self-help mechanism. Multilateralization has not removed the IMF link or even reduced the Fund-linked portion, with 80% of CMIM funding still tied to the IMF. Under the current arrangement, the three countries in the region that received IMF financing in 1997 – Indonesia, South Korea, and Thailand – can only draw, respectively, $2.3 billion, $3.8 billion, and $2.3 billion before the IMF link kicks in. Together, the three countries’ link-free access to CMIM funding amounts to just $8.4 billion. This is not only a lot less than their combined contribution of $28.3 billion, but it is also far smaller than the total of $117.9 billion in the rescue packages put together for the three countries during the Asian crisis – adjusted for inflation, it constitutes only about 5.4% of the 1997 support packages (see table 3 for details). For all practical purposes, the available funding from the CMIM is a virtually insignificant amount, whose expendability in a time of crisis is measured not even in days but in hours. Clearly, without removing the IMF link the CMIM is cannot function as a genuine „self-help” mechanism of regional liquidity support.

Table 3. Current CMIM Borrowing Quotas in Comparison to the IMF-led Financing in 1997 (Billions of US$ Unless Otherwise Noted)

Source: APT, „Joint Ministerial Statement of the 13th ASEAN+3 Finance Ministers’ Meeting.”

The Future of the CMIM: Why No One Really Wants an AMF

The inability of the CMIM to achieve its economic objective of offering a credible mechanism of liquidity relief to its members is inextricably tied with its failure to deliver on its political objective of finding a purely regional solution. The maintenance of the IMF link not only negates the role of the CMIM as a credible source of financing, but it also denies the regional autonomy craved by the proponents of East Asian regionalism. For the CMIM to no longer merely supplement the existing international financial arrangements and genuinely keep the US out, it is quite obvious that the IMF link must be removed or at least clawed back substantially. This, however, remains a politically intractable problem.

The fundamental obstacle to removing the IMF link is the CMIM’s lack of a robust surveillance mechanism, without which it is impossible to mitigate the potential problem of moral hazard inherent to any liquidity support system. From the lenders’ perspective, there must be some way to enforce conditionality to ensure that CMIM funding does not turn into a spigot of easy money for countries facing economic difficulties of their own making.¹³ This requires a broad agreement on a concrete set of rules defining acceptable standards of economic management, lending and disbursement criteria, serious peer review, and commitment to enforce these rules; and these measure go well beyond the pleasantries of informal policy dialogues characterizing the ERPD process.

While the CMIM does call for the creation of a new regional surveillance unit, it is not clear at the present how much competence the APT is willing to vest in the AMRO. On the surface the AMRO will be entrusted with the task of monitoring, assessing, and reporting on the macroeconomic situation and financial soundness of the APT countries; assessing macroeconomic and financial vulnerabilities of the member countries and formulating timely policy recommendations to mitigate such risks; and ensuring compliance of borrowing countries with the terms of financing. Exactly in what concrete ways these tasks will be carried out remains to be seen though. Judging from the past track record of the APT’s repeated and unfulfilled promise that something was going to be done about surveillance, the latest pledge is likely disappoint anyone with high hopes.    

At its core, the lack of an effective surveillance mechanism and the resulting reliance on the IMF is not a technical problem but political. While it is true that some APT countries lack implementation capacity and most countries in the region lack transparency, this is not a problem that is specific or inherent to East Asia, but rather it is a problem faced by nearly all emerging market economies and developing countries. Yet, weak implementation capacity and policy opacity have not prevented the IMF from engaging in Article IV consultations, formulating adjustment programs, and enforcing conditionality on some of the least transparent countries with the weakest implementation capacity in the world, not to mention its surveillance of the APT countries. Implementation-related issues therefore do not pose a sui genesis technical obstacle to the emergence of an East Asian regional surveillance mechanism per se, but to surveillance in general.

The difficulty for East Asia is political, on at least three dimensions. First, how the US would react if the APT were to move seriously toward its own separate surveillance mechanism and the eventual removal of the IMF-link remains an open question. The lack of US opposition to the CMIM thus far is explained by its many limitations discussed above, particularly the lingering IMF-link that subordinates the CMIM to the Fund and consequently enables Washington to exercise indirect veto power over 80% of CMIM funding without contributing a single cent. The American endorsement of the CMIM hinges entirely on this link, and any attempt to remove it is all but guaranteed to generate a very different response from the US.

Second, the CMIM has neither a clear leader nor a clear condominium for a solid political foundation. Instead, it has two budding rivals in an awkward partnership. The compromise that enabled both China and Japan to emerge as equal partners in the CMIMI may actually reduce its capacity to generate a coherent institutional grammar to build a robust surveillance mechanism, without which de-linking from the IMF cannot be pursued. Rules are adopted and enforced so much more easily when there is a clear leader, a role that neither China nor Japan can claim in the region. In the absence of a clear leader, a partnership of equals based on mutual trust, something along the line of the Franco-German partnership in Europe, may be another route. The problem for East Asia, of course, is that Sino-Japanese relations are not exactly on the same footing as Franco-German relations.¹⁴ Given the fact that surveillance and enforcement require politically costly decisions from the lenders, China and Japan need the assurance that they can count on each other to stick to its guns to enforce unpleasant conditionality. Whether the two countries can nurture this kind of mutual trust is another open-ended question.

Under these circumstances, the IMF link actually appears quite attractive to China and Japan, as it gives them a convenient way out of the conundrum by letting the Fund play the role of the bad cop with its enforcement while the two lenders can deny political responsibility for it.¹⁵ It is then little wonder why the lenders, especially China, have not pushed hard on surveillance issues despite the fact that the problem of moral hazard is essentially a lender’s concern. As one Chinese Finance Ministry official put it, „we should prevent [AMRO] from intervening in other countries’ internal affairs, because the monitoring function is only a supervision or performance tracing mechanism necessary in order to provide consultation to relevant countries.”¹⁶

Lastly, while surveillance and enforcement entail political costs to the lenders, they entail even heavier political costs to the borrowers. The difficult decisions that China and Japan must make are decisions that compromise in one way or another the sovereignty of the borrowers. For obvious reasons the latter are deeply ambivalent about this, especially given ASEAN’s long-running tradition of jealously guarding the principle of non-interference – the so-called „ASEAN Way.” In this light, strengthening the independent surveillance capacity of the CMIM is a double-edged sword for the potential borrowers: it is a prerequisite to the removal of the IMF link, but such a robust surveillance mechanism will necessarily impose significant costs on the borrowers’ sovereignty. Although delinking from the IMF is clearly attractive to them, it is attractive only to the extent that the CMIM’s surveillance mechanism would be less intrusive and onerous than that of the IMF. This is a problematic assumption to make, as there is no reason to believe that a delinked CMIM with a rigorous surveillance mechanism would somehow be kinder and gentler to the borrowers than the IMF, and, by extension, China and Japan would somehow be more altruistic and less self-interested than the US. The borrowing countries therefore have every incentive to resist efforts to strengthen the CMIM’s surveillance capacity substantially, all the while happily paying lip service to its cause.

Conclusion

The CMI and its multilateralization are ridden with persistent limitations that should dissuade one from betting on the emergence of a resurrected AMF anytime soon. Despite the progress made so far, the initiative does not have enough traction to propel it toward the much more ambitious and bolder goals envisioned by the AMF. The key, daunting obstacle to overcome is the continued subordination of the CMIM to the IMF, which cannot be lifted by the APT without first developing a credible surveillance mechanism of its own.

Yet, no relevant actor in East Asia truly wants a robust surveillance mechanism for its unpleasant political implications – not the US, not the lenders, not the borrowers. For the US, the development of an effective regional surveillance mechanism under the CMIM framework means the loop will be finally closed on it for good; for China and Japan, it means having to make politically difficult decisions and take responsibility for them in an atmosphere of mutual distrust; and for the borrowers, it means replacing one form of surveillance with another, the latter of which cannot be assumed to be any less costly on their sovereignty than the former if it is to be at least as effective. Without a robust surveillance mechanism, however, removing the IMF-link is not possible, and without removing the IMF-link, the CMIM can neither function as a regional self-help system of liquidity support nor give the APT the freedom from the US it craves. And therein lies the intractable conundrum confronting East Asia, the crux of the political obstacle preventing the CMIM from turning into an AMF and explaining why, in spite of its decade-long drive, East Asia remains fundamentally incapable of producing a coherent regional solution to the recurring problem of global financial instability.

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YOUNGWON CHO – Profesor asistent de ştiinţe politice la St. Francis Xavier University (Canada). Are un doctorat luat la Queen's University. Specialitatea lui este International Political Economy.

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