ASEAN+3 Monetary Cooperation

An Asian Monetary Fund was mooted during the 1997–8 crisis, when several Asian states required sudden infusions of credit, but was abandoned after intense US opposition.22 The 2000 ASEAN+3 Chiang Mai Initiative (CMI) was intended to promote regional cooperation by means of bilateral currency swap agreements among central banks.23 More recently in 2008 and 2009, ASEAN+3 finance ministers agreed the outline of a new accord to pool additional international reserves on a more considerable scale (CMIM), totaling US$120 billion in commitments, with the PRC, Japan and South Korea together providing 80 percent of the total and ASEAN members the remainder.24 The functions allotted to CMIM will include an independent surveillance process that would precede drawings or advances, either as an ongoing monitoring exercise or specific to requests for credit, and for the scheme to be credible – regardless of its scale of commitments – those resources will need to be both separated from existing national resources and beyond the collaborative arrangements to which ASEAN+3 states are accustomed.