An empirical comparison of external indebtedness in East Asia and Southern Europe: reasons for Clearing Integrated Monetary Areas

Abstract

We seek to study the evolution of the external indebtedness of Southern European Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain, which were highly indebted and used to run current account deficits until the Great Crisis of 2008, and the indebtedness of those East Asian countries that ran current account deficits before the crisis of 1997, namely Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand. We pore over foreign debt and balance-of-payments data to understand any potential statistical relationship between (i) external indebtedness and (ii) current account balances plus changes in foreign exchange reserves. Our introductory econometric approach to the issue suggests that indebtedness is often and on average about twice the level attributable to current account balances and reserve changes. In Southern Europe, debt should have increased, but it increased more than expected. In East Asia, particularly since 1997, debt should have decreased, but it followed and upward trend. We attribute this phenomenon to the incomplete structure of the international payment system and, as a general solution, we call for the implementation of a regional real-time gross settlement system.