RMBI or RMBR? Is the Renminbi Destined to - 麻省理工学院人工智能研究专业

RMBI or RMBR? Is the Renminbi Destined to
Become a Global or Regional Currency?∗

Barry Eichengreen
经济系
加州大学, 伯克利
伯克利, CA 94720-3880 美国
eichengr@berkeley.edu
和
Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI)
67 Erb St. 瓦.
滑铁卢, 在, N2L 6C2 Canada

Domenico Lombardi
Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI)
67 Erb St. 瓦.
滑铁卢, 在, N2L 6C2 Canada
dlombardi@cigionline.org

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抽象的
Previous studies have focused on when the renminbi will play a signiﬁcant role as an international
currency, but less attention has been paid to where. We ﬁll this gap by contrasting two answers to
问题. One is that the renminbi will assume the role of a global currency similar to the U.S.
dollar. Supporters point to China’s widely diversiﬁed trade and ﬁnancial ﬂows and to its institutional
倡议, not just in Asia but around the world. The other is that the renminbi will play a regional role
in Asia equivalent to that of the euro in Greater Europe. Proponents of this view argue that China
has a natural advantage in leveraging regional supply chains and deepening its links with other Asian
countries as well as in developing regional institutions. 亚洲, they argue on these grounds, will become
the natural habitat for the renminbi.

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1. 介绍

Although much has been written about when China’s currency, the renminbi (RMB), 将要
assume an international role, less attention has been paid to the question of where. 一
view is that the renminbi will eventually challenge the dollar as the leading global cur-
rency. Supporting theories posit that network effects are strong, meaning that if it pays
for banks, ﬁrms, and governments in some countries to do business in renminbi then it
will pay for banks, ﬁrms, and governments in other countries to do so as well, regardless
of where they are located. Supporting evidence includes the fact that China engages in

∗ The authors acknowledge CIGI for supporting this project and Coby Hu for excellent research

协助.

Asian Economic Papers 16:1

C(西德:3) 2017 by Asian Economic Panel and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

根据知识共享署名发布 3.0 Unported (抄送 3.0)

执照

土井:10.1162/ASEP_a_00483

RMBI or RMBR? Is the Renminbi Destined to Become a Global or Regional Currency?

merchandise and commodity trade with economies in every part of the world, as beﬁts
its position as the largest national exporter. China similarly makes direct foreign invest-
ments in every region. From these observations ﬂows the conclusion that the renminbi
will ultimately come to rival the U.S. dollar as a global currency.

The alternative is that the renminbi is destined to be a leading regional currency, in Asia
尤其. Its future international role, 在这种情况下, will more closely resemble that of
the euro than the dollar. The euro is used as an international unit of account, means of
payment and store of value, primarily in Europe’s neighborhood—in European coun-
tries as well as non-euro area members and countries to Europe’s immediate east and
south. Empirical studies conﬁrm that the inﬂuence of geographical distance on inter-
national trade remains signiﬁcant, reﬂecting transportation costs, broadly deﬁned.1
More strikingly, geographical distance also matters for ﬁnancial transactions, reﬂecting
the cost and difﬁculty of acquiring and disseminating information across space. 给定
how use of a currency in cross-border transactions ﬂows from the geography of those
交易, this implies a bias toward the use of a given currency unit in the economic
neighborhood of its national issuer. Similar to the role of the euro in Greater Europe,
it follows that Asia is the natural region in which the renminbi will come to act as an
international currency.

Consistent with this observation, the ﬁrst seven countries to establish mechanisms for
direct trading of their currencies against the renminbi—rather than buying and selling
dollars as an intermediate step toward acquiring and disposing of the Chinese currency—
were Asian countries. Efforts to foster renminbi internationalization have also relied
heavily on developing transactions with an offshore ﬁnancial center, 香港, 谁的
prominence reﬂects precisely its location in Asia. These reﬂections suggest that the ren-
minbi will come to play an important role mainly in the region.

Political scientists (例如, Helleiner and Korschner 2014) argue that the decision to use a
currency in cross-border transactions reﬂects not just economic links with the issuer but
also the latter’s ability to project political leverage and power. The dollar has an important
角色, these analysts observe, in regions where the United States has political inﬂuence.
China is best able to project leverage and power in the South China Sea and elsewhere
in in the Asia-Paciﬁc region, lacking as it does the aircraft carriers and allies needed to
project them over longer distances, at least to an equivalent extent. 再次, the conclusion
follows that the renminbi’s future is as a regional currency for Asia more than as a global
currency in the same manner as the dollar.

1 “The death of distance has been exaggerated,” as Anderson and van Wincoop (2004) put it in their

survey of the literature on trade costs.

Asian Economic Papers

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RMBI or RMBR? Is the Renminbi Destined to Become a Global or Regional Currency?

The rebuttal is that the tyranny of distance is declining with improvements in transporta-
tion and information technologies. It may be true that the ﬁrst seven countries to establish
direct trading in renminbi were in Asia, but a growing number of countries in other parts
of the world have followed suit. Hong Kong’s special status as an offshore renminbi cen-
ter is now being challenged by newly established centers from Singapore and Frankfurt to
London and Toronto. This trend is likely to continue as China relaxes restrictions on use
of the renminbi and opens its capital account.

Our goal in this paper is to evaluate these two views of the renminbi’s prospective role
as an international unit of account, means of payment, and store of value for private and
ofﬁcial transactions. We begin in Section 2 with a review of the theory and history of in-
ternational currencies. In Sections 3 和 4 we then develop the cases for a global and re-
gional role for the renminbi, 分别. Our conclusions, in Section 5, are mixed, reﬂect-
ing the fact that this paper has not only two views but also two authors.

2. Theory and history

Eichengreen (2014) distinguishes two classes of models of international currency status.
One class (examples of which include Krugman [1980, 1984] and Matsuyama, Kiyotaki,
and Matsui [1993]) emphasizes the power of network effects in the international mone-
tary domain. Because of the importance of network-increasing returns, once a currency is
adopted for international transactions, it comes to be used widely. 在这些模型中, it pays
to do international business in the same currency that one’s counterparties use in their
own international transactions, including in transactions with third parties.

These network-increasing returns can neutralize other disadvantages of using a poten-
tial international currency—for example, such that the central bank issuing it and there-
fore acting as liquidity provider of last resort of the currency is in a different region and
time zone. From this it follows that once a currency is used in international transactions
in some countries; it will come to be used globally. Other implications include the fact
that ﬁrst-mover advantage is powerful, that persistence is strong, and that international
currency status may be a natural monopoly. Many of these theoretical analyses are moti-
vated by the desire to understand the international role of the U.S. dollar, which is used
as an international unit of account, means of payment, and store of value globally and not
merely, 说, in the Western Hemisphere.

The alternative (“new”) view of international currency status does not deny the exis-
tence of network-increasing returns but builds on theoretical work on open systems
(看, 例如, Farrell and Klemperer 2007). In this view, increasing returns may exist but are
not large, and interchangeability costs in high-tech 21st century ﬁnancial markets are
no longer so high. By implication, it is possible to have low transaction costs as well as

Asian Economic Papers

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RMBI or RMBR? Is the Renminbi Destined to Become a Global or Regional Currency?

stable and predictable prices in cross-border transactions in several national currencies.
It follows that other modest advantages (that the liquidity provider of last resort of a cur-
rency is in the same time zone or that there are other beneﬁts of proximity, 例如)
可能, 也, be determining factors in the decision by a bank, ﬁrm, or government regard-
ing which currencies to use for international transactions. In this class of models, mul-
tiple currencies can play a role in the international domain, with different units being
used by different counterparties, including in different locations, as a function of local or
regional characteristics.

Proponents of both views draw support from history. Those who subscribe to the old
看法, point to the dominance of speciﬁc currencies in international transactions at dif-
ferent points in time: the pound sterling before 1914 和美国. dollar after 1945. 他们的
analyses highlight how these currencies were widely used in cross-border transactions
世界各地. They emphasize evidence of persistence or “lock-in” with the curren-
cies in question continuing to play global roles even after the share of the issuing coun-
try’s currency in international transactions had peaked, consistent with a setting in which
network increasing returns are strong.

Advocates of the alternative (“new”) view argue that a closer look reveals that there has
always been more than one consequential international currency at a given point in time,
and that the use of different currencies has typically had a regional dimension. Lindert’s
(1969) study showed that the foreign exchange reserves of central banks and governments
在 1900 和 1913 were divided between the British sterling, the French franc, and the Ger-
man mark. Building on Lindert’s work, Eichengreen and Flandreau (1996) describe how
the mark was held and used mainly in Eastern and Southeastern Europe as well as in
parts of Scandinavia, whereas the franc was used in Western European countries like
西班牙, 比利时, and Switzerland, and the sterling dominated in Latin America and in the
British Commonwealth and Empire.

Eichengreen and Flandreau (2009) provide a parallel analysis of the 1920s and 1930s. 他们
ﬁnd that the sterling and the U.S. dollar both featured prominently in the reserve port-
folios of central banks and governments, with the sterling playing an important role in
Scandinavia (having by this time displaced the German mark), Portugal, and other Eu-
ropean members of the so-called sterling area and, as before, in the British Common-
wealth and Empire, while the dollar took on a growing role in other parts of the world,
including Latin America. That there were shifts relative to the pre-World War I posi-
的, with Scandinavia moving into sterling’s camp and the dollar being utilized more
widely in Latin America, poses a challenge to the traditional view emphasizing lock-
in and persistence. Extrapolated to the future, this suggests that there may be greater
scope for relatively rapid adoption of the renminbi for cross-border transactions in Asia
than globally.

Asian Economic Papers

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RMBI or RMBR? Is the Renminbi Destined to Become a Global or Regional Currency?

Another literature examines the use of international currencies during and after the Bret-
ton Woods period. Some authors such as Bergsten (1975) suggest that the Bretton Woods
system is properly viewed as a tripartite structure consisting of three blocs based on the
sterling, the dollar, and gold. The interwar and wartime sterling area persisted, 尽管
the rest of the world coalesced into gold and dollar blocs. Members of the dollar area
(巴西, 加拿大, 以色列, 日本, 墨西哥, Norway, Saudi Arabia, 瑞典, Thailand, Turkey,
委内瑞拉, Germany from 1967 and Spain from 1970) took the bulk of their exchange
earnings in dollars. Members of the gold bloc, 相比之下, took fully 75 他们的百分比
increased reserves in the form of gold in the 1960s. The core members of this post-World
War II gold bloc—Belgium, 法国, 意大利, 荷兰人, and Switzerland—were not
only geographically contiguous but had also been core members of the gold bloc of the
1930s and, 的确, key members of the 19th-century Latin Monetary Union.

其他的, like McKinnon (1979), argue that the dollar was the dominant international vehi-
cle and reserve currency in transactions among banks and the primary currency of invoice
in international commodity trade throughout this period. They refer not to the Bretton
Woods and post-Bretton Woods systems but to the “gold-dollar system” through the
early 1970s and the “dollar” or “limping-dollar standard” thereafter. Members of this
学校 (例如, Prasad 2014) emphasize the extent to which the international monetary and
ﬁnancial system is still heavily dollar-based even today. Goldberg and Tille (2005) 展示
that the dollar’s use in invoicing international merchandise transactions remains far in
excess of the U.S. share of global merchandise trade. The dollar is used in 85 的百分比
global foreign exchange transactions, far in excess of the United States’ share of global
cross-border ﬁnancial transactions. And the dollar continues to constitute more than
60 percent of global identiﬁed foreign exchange reserves despite the fact that the United
States’ share of GDP is no more than 25 百分.

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These observations are consistent with strong network-increasing returns, in the manner
of traditional models in which a single national currency dominates international trans-
行动. In the extreme, the implication of this view emphasizing dollar dominance is that
for the renminbi to become a true international currency, it will not only have to supplant
the dollar, but will also have to do so globally. The rebuttal is that the Bretton Woods and
post-Bretton Woods periods were special by virtue of the absence of viable alternatives
to the dollar. 那是, the dollar was by default the dominant international currency, 作为
no other national unit possessed the scale, 稳定, and liquidity needed to render it at-
tractive for widespread cross-border use. This is something that will now change, 这是
hypothesized, as the renminbi acquires the stability and liquidity required to assume a
consequential international role.

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If this hypothesis is correct, then the dollar and the renminbi may eventually coexist in
the international domain. The question is whether they will both be used globally, 在

Asian Economic Papers

RMBI or RMBR? Is the Renminbi Destined to Become a Global or Regional Currency?

数字 1. Regional composition of China’s exports, 2013

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来源: UN Comtrade Database.

∗

笔记:

Taiwan is included in Comtrade data under “Other Asia, not elsewhere speciﬁed.” See http://unstats.un.org/unsd/tradekb

/Knowledgebase/Taiwan-Province-of-China-Trade-data.

cross-border transactions with counterparties around the world, or mainly in different
地区: the renminbi in Asia and the dollar in other parts of the world.

3. The case for a global currency

There is no one-to-one mapping between, 一方面, trade and ﬁnancial transac-
tions with a country, 和, 另一方面, the likelihood of using its currency as an
international unit of account, means of payment, and store of value. But studies estab-
lishing this fact also establish a positive association between the two tendencies: 更多的
extensive economic relations with a country increase the likelihood of using its currency
in cross-border transactions. This is not surprising given that ﬁrms, 银行, 和别的
entities in a country will have a natural preference for using their domestic currency in
cross-border transactions, in turn conferring on their foreign counterparties an incentive
to accommodate that preference. Goldberg and Tille (2005) document this for the choice
of currency for invoicing merchandise transactions. The earlier literature has similarly
shown that trade and ﬁnancial transactions with a country, the use of its national unit
to settle those transactions, and the need to hold these currencies in foreign reserves all
go together.

It is therefore relevant to observe that China’s foreign trade and ﬁnancial transactions
are widely distributed across regions. 人物 1 和 2 show the geographical distribution

Asian Economic Papers

RMBI or RMBR? Is the Renminbi Destined to Become a Global or Regional Currency?

数字 2. Regional composition of China’s imports, 2013

来源: UN Comtrade Database.

∗

笔记:

Taiwan is included in Comtrade data under “Other Asia, not elsewhere speciﬁed.”

of China’s imports and exports. Only one-quarter of China’s exports go to other Asian
国家, excluding Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan; 额外的 24 percent go to Eu-
绳索, 和 23 percent to North America. The regional composition of China’s imports is
more concentrated, but only slightly, with one-third of the total drawn from other Asian
国家. This difference on the import side reﬂects China’s role in global supply chains,
where large volumes of intermediate goods from Asia (industrial materials, parts and
成分, and semi-ﬁnished goods, 例如) are imported to be processed for sub-
sequent export (Choi 2015).

At ﬁrst glance, the direction of China’s foreign direct investment, 如图所示 3,
is more concentrated, with the majority destined for Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan.
But these offshore centers are serving mainly as intermediaries for Chinese foreign in-
vestment ultimately destined for other countries. Excluding offshore centers, Chinese
foreign investment is widely distributed. This reﬂects investments by Chinese enterprises
in commodity- and energy-related sectors as well as manufacturing.

同样地, China’s free trade agreements (FTAs) reﬂect its geographically diversiﬁed trade
and investment ﬂows. Although the country’s early FTAs were with countries in Asia
(ASEAN in 2004, Pakistan in 2006, Singapore in 2008), China has since negotiated agree-
ments with countries in other parts of the world (包括, 迄今为止, 智利, 秘鲁, Costa
Rica, 冰岛, and Switzerland; 见表 1). FTAs under discussion or likely to be under
discussion in the future suggest that this geographically diversiﬁed approach to negotia-
tions will persist.

Asian Economic Papers

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RMBI or RMBR? Is the Renminbi Destined to Become a Global or Regional Currency?

数字 3. Regional composition of China’s overseas direct investment, 2013

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来源: CEIC Database.

桌子 1. Existing and prospective FTAs

国家

Bilateral FTAs
Developing countries

巴基斯坦
智利
秘鲁
Costa Rica

Developed countries
新西兰
新加坡
冰岛
瑞士
韩国
澳大利亚

Multilateral FTAs

ASEAN

FTA under negotiation

Gulf Cooperation Council
Regional Comprehensive Partnership
ASEAN FTA Upgrade
Norway
Japan and Korea
斯里兰卡
Maldives
乔治亚州

FTA under consideration

印度
ColombiaMoldova
斐济
Nepal

日期

十一月 2006
十一月 2005
四月 2009
四月 2010

四月 2008
十月 2008
四月 2013
七月 2013
六月 2015
六月 2015

十一月 2004

七月 2004
可能 2013
九月 2014
九月 2008
一月 2013
九月 2014
九月 2015
十二月 2015
2003
N/A
N/A
N/A
行进 2016

来源: Whalley and Li (2014), 中国, Ministry of Commerce (2015).

Asian Economic Papers

RMBI or RMBR? Is the Renminbi Destined to Become a Global or Regional Currency?

桌子 2. Dominant reference currency
by region (2013–16)

RMB USD Euro

亚洲
欧洲
Middle East and Africa
北美
South America
全部的

5
1
1
1
3
11

6
2
3
1
5
17

1
9
2
0
0
12

With the growth of China’s trade and ﬁnancial links comes an incentive to conduct trans-
actions in renminbi. 反过来, this creates an incentive to stabilize a trade partner’s local
currency against the renminbi, which encourages the central banks of these countries to
hold renminbi-denominated foreign exchange reserves and establish contingent renminbi
liquidity lines with the People’s Bank of China (PBOC). But is this last tendency limited
mainly to Asia, or is it observed more widely? To address this issue, Subramanian and
Kessler (2013) estimated “Frankel and Wei regressions,” where the value of the local cur-
rency against a numeraire, in this case the Swiss franc, is taken as a function of the ren-
minbi/franc, dollar/franc, yen/franc, and euro/franc rates. We update their results for a
sample of 41 国家, 如表所示 2 for the period January 2013 to January 2016
(as well as for the July 2012–July 2015 时期). Speciﬁcally, we estimate:

(西德:3)

(西德:2)

dln

Xt
C H Ft

(西德:2)

= p1

∗ dln

+ p4

∗ dln

(西德:4)

(西德:5)

(西德:3)

(西德:2)

U S$t C H Ft (西德:2) J PYt C H Ft ∗ dln + p2 (西德:3) + A + et , (西德:3) RMBt C H Ft + p3 ∗ dln (西德:3) (西德:2) EU Rt C H Ft (1) Xt C H Ft where dln denotes the change in the log of currency X (美国. dollar, the yuan, the euro, and the Japanese yen) all against the Swiss franc. The dominant reference cur- rency in Table 2 is then taken as the currency with the largest effect on the exchange rate of the countries considered. As one would expect, we ﬁnd the dollar to be the dominant reference currency for many countries throughout the Americas, 亚洲, 欧洲, and the Middle East. The euro tends to be the dominant reference currency mainly for European countries. 有趣的是, the renminbi is the second most dominant reference currency in Asia, and in particular for the ASEAN economies.2 2 It is possible to think that the observed correlation of other Asian currencies with the renminbi reﬂects the fact that they have a common correlation with the dollar. But we are controlling separately—and directly—in these regressions for their correlation with the dollar. 43 Asian Economic Papers l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / 直接的 . 米特 . / e d u a s e p a r t i c e – 压力 / 的f / / / / / 1 6 1 3 5 1 6 8 5 1 6 3 a s e p _ a _ 0 0 4 8 3 压力 . 来宾来访 0 8 九月 2 0 2 3 RMBI or RMBR? Is the Renminbi Destined to Become a Global or Regional Currency? 桌子 3. Determinants of renminbi weight (2013–16) RMB Coef. Robust Std. Err. t P > |t| [95% Conf. 间隔] 1.694931 Financial Inﬂation Import share −1.310916 Constant 0.5871824 −0.2414102 0.1520255 0.8483331 0.1651439 0.0924021 2.89 0.007 −1.59 0.122 −1.55 0.132 1.79 0.084 0.4973646 −0.5514683 −3.041103 −0.023315 2.892497 0.0686479 0.4192707 0.3535993 Number of obs = 35 F(3, 31) = 3.48 Prob > F = 0.0275 R2 = 0.02678 Root MSE = 0.2553 In addition to having the strongest effect in a number of Asian countries, the renminbi also has a signiﬁcant effect in several South American countries and a statistically signif- icant effect in a number of European countries as well.3 The renminbi tends to be impor- tant for the other BRICS members (巴西, 俄罗斯, India and South Africa) as well as for countries elsewhere such as Israel, 墨西哥, and Peru. 桌子 3 shows that the weight on the renminbi is plausibly a function of commercial and ﬁnancial links between a given country and China—links that are as much global as re- gional. Following Subramanian and Kessler (2013), we relate the coefﬁcient on the ren- minbi/Swiss franc exchange rate in the preceding equation to bilateral trade with China, the similarity of inﬂation rates, and common ﬁnancial shocks: p RMB Countryi = α ∗ ShTradeChina Countryi + β ∗ CommonInﬂationChina Countryi + γ ∗ CommonFinancialShocksChina Countryi + ei Common inﬂation shocks are measured as the correlation between a country’s monthly inﬂation rate and that of China during the period January 2012–December 2014, 和com- mon ﬁnancial shocks are then taken as the correlation between a country’s reference stock market index daily returns and the Shanghai Stock Exchange A Share Index daily returns over the July 2012–October 2014 时期. The data correspond to the sample in Subrama- nian and Kessler (2013). Both the inﬂation ﬁgures and the stock index return ﬁgures are logged. The share of trade is measured as the proportion of a country’s imports from China relative to the imports from the rest of the world. This ﬁgure is taken as the aver- age import ratios for 2012–13. 表中 3, the coefﬁcient of a country’s ﬁnancial shock is positive and statistically signif- icant at the 10 percent conﬁdence level. 因此, we observe a larger renminbi co-movement 3 This is in contrast to the euro, whose effect is limited to other European countries, and the dol- 拉尔, which according to this methodology, is the most important exchange rate for countries in a variety of different regions, as beﬁts a global currency. 44 Asian Economic Papers l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / 直接的 . 米特 . / e d u a s e p a r t i c e – 压力 / 的f / / / / / 1 6 1 3 5 1 6 8 5 1 6 3 a s e p _ a _ 0 0 4 8 3 压力 . 来宾来访 0 8 九月 2 0 2 3 RMBI or RMBR? Is the Renminbi Destined to Become a Global or Regional Currency? 桌子 4. Founding members of the AIIB East Asia and Paciﬁc (12) Bruneia, Cambodia, Chinaa, Indonesiaa, Laosa, Malaysia, Mongoliaa, 菲律宾, Republic of Koreaa, Singaporea, Thailand, Vietnam Other Asia (12) Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Indiaa, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Maldivesa, Myanmara, Nepala, Pakistana, 斯里兰卡, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan Oceania (2) Australiaa, New Zealanda Middle East (9) 埃及, 伊朗, Israela, Jordana, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabiaa, United Arab Emiratesa Western Europe (15) Austriaa, Denmarka, Finlanda, 法国, Germanya, 冰岛, 意大利, Luxembourga, Netherlandsa, Norwaya, 波兰, Portugal, 西班牙, 瑞典, 瑞士, United Kingdoma Other Europe (5) Georgiaa, Maltaa, 波兰, Russiaa, Turkey South America (1) Brazil Africa (1) South Africa Source: AIIB.org Note: A. Instrument of ratiﬁcation is accepted. l 从http下载 : / / 直接的 . 米特 . / e d u a s e p a r t i c e – 压力 / 的f / / / / / 1 6 1 3 5 1 6 8 5 1 6 3 a s e p _ a _ 0 0 4 8 3 压力 . 来宾来访 0 8 九月 2 0 2 3 from a higher correlation for a country’s ﬁnancial market with China, controlling for inﬂa- tion and trade. 显然, the coefﬁcients for inﬂation shocks and trade shares, although negative, do not seem to affect the renminbi co-movement for the sample countries’ exchange rates. The question of whether the renminbi’s future is mainly as a regional or global currency should be addressed from an institutional perspective as well. Beijing has used the China Development Bank and Export-Import Bank of China, 例如, to promote renminbi- denominated lending and settlement. Countries to which these institutions lend receive funds in renminbi, which they then use to ﬁnance imports from China and to purchase the services of Chinese construction companies. Although a signiﬁcant share of the lend- ing by these state banks is to other Asian countries, a non-negligible share is to countries and companies outside of the region (to the government of Venezuela in 2010, 为了考试- 普莱, and to small- and medium-size enterprises in a variety of African countries). China has recently sponsored the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) to promote infrastructure investment in the Asia-Paciﬁc region and, not inciden- tally, to create business for Chinese construction companies. Although the AIIB’s current objective is to contribute to Asian infrastructure development and regional integration, membership is global, not regional, 和 57 prospective founding members at the time of writing. 这些包括 24 countries in Asia, 20 在欧洲, 和 9 in the Middle East (见表 4). These countries will all be contributing capital to the bank, and their construc- tion companies and consultants will similarly be competing for business. It will not be surprising, 所以, to see the AIIB expand its operations to developing countries out- side of Asia. 45 Asian Economic Papers RMBI or RMBR? Is the Renminbi Destined to Become a Global or Regional Currency? 桌子 5. Offshore RMB centers Country City Date Bank Hong Kong Macau Taipei Singapore China SAR China SAR Taiwan Singapore United Kingdom London Germany South Korea France Luxembourg Qatar Canada Malaysia Australia Thailand 2003.12 Bank of China 2004.08 Bank of China 2012.12 Bank of China 2013.04 Industrial and Commercial Bank of China 2014.06 China Construction Bank 2014.06 Bank of China Frankfurt 2014.07 Bank of Communications Seoul 2014.09 Bank of China Paris 2014.09 Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Luxembourg Doha 2014.11 Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Toronto, Vancouver 2014.11 Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Kuala Lumpur Sydney Bangkok 2014.11 Bank of China 2014.11 Bank of China 2015.01 Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Source: Bloomberg, Bank of China, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, MAS, People’s Bank of China, Reuters, UK government data, Wall Street Journal. Other institutional bases for wider international use of the renminbi include swap lines with the PBOC, the designation of a Chinese ﬁnancial institution as ofﬁcial clearing bank for settling renminbi-denominated transactions, and a quota for investing in China’s local- currency equity market (a renminbi-qualiﬁed foreign institutional investor [RQFII] 配额). Weir (2015) refers to these initiatives as the “three gifts,” because they require negotia- tion and agreement with the Chinese authorities and because they tend to go together. They represent implicit endorsement by the Chinese authorities of a center’s offshore RMB status. 在实践中, these arrangements extend beyond Asia. 桌子 5 lists offshore clearing banks in foreign ﬁnancial centers by date of establishment. These centers now include many cities outside of Asia and across the globe, including Frankfurt, 伦敦, 巴黎, 悉尼, and Toronto. 的确, virtually every important ﬁnancial hub is now a designated ren- minbi offshore center with the exception of New York. If we exclude Hong Kong, Macau, and Taipei, which played strategic roles in the early development of the offshore ren- minbi market, only four Asian cities are designated offshore renminbi centers, compared with four in Europe and three in the rest of the world. In terms of geographic distribution, there is no obvious bias favoring Asia. Having an ofﬁcial clearing bank matters because access to the renminbi is limited, since access to Chinese ﬁnancial markets is limited. This designation creates a presumption that the bank in question will clear transactions in renminbi for offshore counterparties. One can argue that the presence of an ofﬁcial clearing bank will matter only for a transitional period, because all foreign banks will have access to the onshore renminbi market once China’s capital account is fully open and thus ofﬁcial clearing banks will then have no advantage. 如果, 另一方面, there is a path-dependent aspect to ﬁnancial develop- 蒙特, then ofﬁcial clearing bank status can have persistent effects on the geography of 46 Asian Economic Papers l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / 直接的 . 米特 . / e d u a s e p a r t i c e – 压力 / 的f / / / / / 1 6 1 3 5 1 6 8 5 1 6 3 a s e p _ a _ 0 0 4 8 3 压力 . 来宾来访 0 8 九月 2 0 2 3 RMBI or RMBR? Is the Renminbi Destined to Become a Global or Regional Currency? 桌子 6. RMB QFII quotas Country Quota (RMB Date billions) Announced Hong Kong, 中国 270 Singapore United Kingdom France South Korea Germany Qatar Canada Australia 50 80 80 80 80 30 50 50 十二月 2011 十月 2013 十月 2013 行进 2014 七月 2014 七月 2014 十一月 2014 十一月 2014 十一月 2014 来源: Hatzvi, Nixon, and Wright (2014). international ﬁnance. Hong Kong was the ﬁrst offshore RMB center, and for ten years until October 2013 had the only ofﬁcial offshore RMB clearing bank. 自那以后, six additional clearing banks have been designated for Asian countries, and seven have been designated for non-Asian countries (for these purposes we classify Qatar as a non-Asian country). The RQFII program allows designated institutional investors to invest in renminbi- denominated assets in China. Virtually all countries with ofﬁcial clearing banks have RQFII quotas (见表 6). Possession of an RQFII quota encourages local fund managers to source renminbi credit for use in investing in Chinese markets. Some fund manage- ment companies have been able to access RQFII quotas in more than one jurisdiction, 然而, and aside from the case of Hong Kong, few if any of these quotas have been fully taken up. Both observations raise questions about whether these quotas will sig- niﬁcantly affect the location of renminbi-denominated business. To the extent that they do, further allocation of such quotas weakens their original Asia- and speciﬁcally Hong Kong–centric bias. l 从http下载 : / / 直接的 . 米特 . / e d u a s e p a r t i c e – 压力 / 的f / / / / / 1 6 1 3 5 1 6 8 5 1 6 3 a s e p _ a _ 0 0 4 8 3 压力 . Central banks in a large set of countries in Asia and other regions—30 at the time of writing—now have swap lines with the PBOC (见表 7). Thirteen of these bilateral swap arrangements are with Asian central banks, and eleven are with European central banks and others are with central banks in additional parts of the world. China’s second largest swap line (after that with Hong Kong SAR) is with the European Central Bank, 关于- ﬂecting the fact that China is the European Union’s second largest export market. These lines are useful for providing renminbi liquidity where ofﬁcial clearing banks have not been designated and for supplementing ofﬁcial clearing bank liquidity where they have. Access to renminbi funds can be essential in a crisis, and in the absence of such access, the local authorities will be reluctant to permit resident banks and ﬁrms to acquire ren- minbi exposure. In a handful of locations, notably Hong Kong, the PBOC swap line is also regularly resorted to by the local monetary authority as a mechanism for enhancing the liquidity of local renminbi markets and encouraging commercial and ﬁnancial business in the currency. 来宾来访 0 8 九月 2 0 2 3 47 Asian Economic Papers RMBI or RMBR? Is the Renminbi Destined to Become a Global or Regional Currency? 桌子 7. Swap arrangements with the People’s Bank of China Country Albania Argentina Argentina Armenia Australia Australia Belarus Brazil Canada Chile European Union Hong Kong Hong Kong Hong Kong Hungary Iceland Iceland Indonesia Indonesia Kazakhstan Kazakhstan Malaysia Malaysia Mongolia Mongolia Mongolia New Zealand New Zealand Pakistan Qatar Russia Singapore Singapore South Korea South Korea South Korea Sri Lanka Suriname Switzerland Tajikistan Thailand Thailand Turkey Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom Uzbekistan Date 2013.09 2009.03 2014.07 2015.03 2012.03 2015.04 2009.03 2013.03 2014.11 2015.05 2013.10 2009.01 2011.11 2014.11 2013.09 2010.06 2013.09 2009.03 2013.10 2011.06 2014.12 2009.02 2012.02 2011.05 2012.03 2014.08 2011.04 2014.05 2011.12 2014.11 2014.10 2010.07 2013.03 2008.12 2011.10 2014.10 2014.09 2015.03 2014.07 2015.09 2011.12 2014.12 2012.02 2012.06 2012.01 2013.06 2011.04 Amount in yuan 2 十亿 70 十亿 70 十亿 1 十亿 200 十亿 200 十亿 20 十亿 190 十亿 200 十亿 22 十亿 350 十亿 200 十亿 400 十亿 400 十亿 10 十亿 3.5 十亿 3.5 十亿 100 十亿 100 十亿 7 十亿 7 十亿 80 十亿 180 十亿 5 十亿 10 十亿 15 十亿 25 十亿 25 十亿 10 十亿 35 十亿 150 十亿 150 十亿 300 十亿 180 十亿 360 十亿 360 十亿 10 十亿 1 十亿 150 十亿 0.5 十亿 70 十亿 70 十亿 10 十亿 15 十亿 35 十亿 200 十亿 0.7 billion Source: Garcia-Herrero and Xia (2013), AP, China Daily, PBoC, Xinhua, Reuters, Bloomberg, Reserve Bank of Australia, Reserve Bank of New Zealand. Garcia-Herrero and Xia (2013) and Liao and McDowell (2015) have analyzed who is on the receiving end of these arrangements and why. We follow them in analyzing the de- terminants of their incidence, using an updated list of swap agreements for 166 国家. The dependent variable is possession of a bilateral swap arrangement with the PBOC, and explanatory variables include economic size, trade and ﬁnancial integration with China, distance from China, and a variety of other macroeconomic indicators. To capture 48 Asian Economic Papers l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / 直接的 . 米特 . / e d u a s e p a r t i c e – 压力 / 的f / / / / / 1 6 1 3 5 1 6 8 5 1 6 3 a s e p _ a _ 0 0 4 8 3 压力 . 来宾来访 0 8 九月 2 0 2 3 RMBI or RMBR? Is the Renminbi Destined to Become a Global or Regional Currency? regionalization, we add a dummy variable for Asian countries. This allows us to test whether Asian countries are ceteris paribus more likely than countries in other parts of the world to receive swap lines from the PBOC. 如表所示 8, the dummy variable for Asian countries is uniformly indistinguish- able from zero for both the probit estimation of entering a bilateral swap arrangement and the amount of swap given. 不出所料, the partner’s GDP is important for both deci- 西翁. Larger economies are more likely to enter into a swap arrangement with China, and such arrangements are more likely to have a larger amount. The PBOC does not appear to prefer Asian countries when extending bilateral swap arrangements, or so it would appear after controlling for other variables such as the size of the economy, ﬁnancial and trade ﬂows, and inﬂation. Similar to Cheung, 林, and Zhan (2016), we show trade part- nerships matter for bilateral swap arrangements as shown in Table 8A and Table 8B. 最后, China has supplemented these bilateral renminbi swaps with the BRICS Bank Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA). Through the BRICS Bank, members will lend money to one another for development projects, where some of that money will presum- ably be denominated in the currency of the lender. Under the CRA, participating central banks will be able to draw up to US$ 100 billion of international reserves from one an-
其他, subject to certain conditions. China has made the largest initial commitment, 的
美元$ 41 十亿, to the CRA. Revealingly, China’s partners in this arrangement include countries both within (India and Russia) and outside Asia (Brazil and South Africa). CRA capital allocations and quo- tas are shown in Table 9. But it is not clear whether CRA lending by China will be in dol- lars or renminbi (的确, the initial BRICS CRA treaty refers to dollars). The CRA cannot therefore automatically be viewed as a mechanism for promoting use of the renminbi within the region. 4. The case for a regional currency Although the renminbi is an increasingly popular global payments currency, 它是 2.79 percent share of global payments is dwarfed by the 45 percent share of the dollar.4 The dollar is still the preferred reserve currency, and is still far and away the dominant cur- rency in global foreign exchange markets, as noted earlier. These facts reﬂect the dollar’s ﬁrst-mover advantage, the depth and liquidity of U.S. ﬁnancial markets, the close com- mercial and ﬁnancial ties of other countries with the U.S. 经济 (ties that are larger than China’s at market exchange rates) and America’s geopolitical and military leverage (which remains considerable, even if in decline). 4 Figures are based on Swift data as released on 6 十月 2015. 49 Asian Economic Papers l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / 直接的 . 米特 . / e d u a s e p a r t i c e – 压力 / 的f / / / / / 1 6 1 3 5 1 6 8 5 1 6 3 a s e p _ a _ 0 0 4 8 3 压力 . 来宾来访 0 8 九月 2 0 2 3 RMBI or RMBR? Is the Renminbi Destined to Become a Global or Regional Currency? 桌子 8. Determinants of bilateral swaps A. Determinants of bilateral swap arrangements (1) (2) (3) (4) Ln GDP (美元$, 真实的)

Free trade agreement

Ln distance to Beijing

Past default

Open capital account

Rule of law

Corruption Index

亚洲

Other Asia

欧洲

美国

氮
Pseudo R2

0.168∗∗∗
(3.07)
0.662∗∗
(2.22)
−0.473
(−2.47)

∗∗

0.211∗∗∗
(3.38)
0.600∗
(1.96)
−0.497
(−2.49)
0.446
(1.25)
−0.136
(−1.64)

∗∗

0.201∗∗∗
(2.95)
0.608
(1.55)
−0.594
(−2.16)
0.504
(1.35)
−0.218∗∗
(−2.01)
−0.280
(−0.57)
0.450
(1.02)
−0.060
(−0.12)

467

0.1744

467

0.2077

467

0.2213

0.197∗∗∗
(2.80)
0.391
(0.87)
−0.220
(−0.53)
0.428
(1.05)
−0.214∗
(−1.83)
−0.477
(−0.91)
0.548
(1.20)
1.091
(1.28)
0.909
(1.61)
0.809∗
(1.70)
0.296
(0.53)

467

0.2437

乙. Determinants of bilateral swap amount

(1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

Ln GDP (美元$, 真实的) Share of exports Distance to Beijing Free trade Overseas direct investment ∗∗∗ 0.041 (0.29) 0.083 (3.54) −0.084 (−0.15) 1.869∗ (1.85) ∗∗∗ 0.033 (0.23) 0.074 (2.99) −0.030 (−0.05) 1.594 (1.29) 0.095 (1.50) Past default Inﬂation history Open capital account Mills ratio adj. R2 N −1.731∗∗ (−2.51) 0.1224 467 −1.726∗∗ (−2.51) 0.1267 467 ∗∗∗ 0.080 (0.51) 0.076 (3.03) −0.264 (−0.38) 1.644 (1.33) 0.095 (1.49) 0.848 (1.00) −0.009 (−0.19) −1.403∗ (−1.83) 0.1286 467 ∗∗∗ 0.186 (0.66) 0.075 (2.99) −0.484 (−0.57) 1.889 (1.40) 0.099 (1.54) 1.035 (1.09) −0.014 (−0.30) −0.123 (−0.45) −0.900 (−0.66) 0.129 467 来源: GDP data are from World Bank. Distance from Beijing is from Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, 交流电- cessed through http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/∼ksg/data-5.html and calculated using Google Maps. Export data is from UN Comtrade and Observatory of Economic Complexity. Chinese overseas FDI data is from CEIC. Capital account openness uses the Chin-Ito index, accessed through http://web.pdx.edu/∼ito /Chinn-Ito_website.htm Default data collected from Moody’s. Inﬂation, 法律规则, and corruption index are from the World Bank and IMF. Free-trade agreements are accessed online through the Ministry of Commerce, the People’s Republic of China (http://fta.mofcom.gov.cn/english/index.shtml). 笔记: Table 8A dependent variable is a dummy for bilateral swap arrangement that equals 1 if there is a swap arrangement between China and the speciﬁed country. Table 8B dependent variable is the natural log of the bilateral swap amount given in Table 7. Asia dummy equals 1 for East Asian and Southeast Asian countries, including Hong Kong SAR. ∗∗∗ Statistically signiﬁcant at the 1 percent level; ∗∗ ∗ statistically signiﬁcant at the 10 percent level. statistically signiﬁcant at the 5 percent level; 50 Asian Economic Papers l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / 直接的 . 米特 . / e d u a s e p a r t i c e – 压力 / 的f / / / / / 1 6 1 3 5 1 6 8 5 1 6 3 a s e p _ a _ 0 0 4 8 3 压力 . 来宾来访 0 8 九月 2 0 2 3 RMBI or RMBR? Is the Renminbi Destined to Become a Global or Regional Currency? 桌子 9. The BRICS contingent reserve arrangement Country China Brazil Russia India South Africa Total Committed Resourcesa Access to CRA Resourcesb 41 billion USD 18 billion USD 18 billion USD 18 billion USD 5 billion USD 100 billion USD 50 百分 100 百分 100 百分 100 百分 200 percent Source: BRICS Information Centre, 多伦多大学 (2014). See www.brics.utoronto.ca Note: A. 作为 15 七月 2014. 乙. Parties can access resources subject to the maximum access limits equal to the speciﬁed percentage of each party’s individual commitment. The alternative is to argue that the renminbi is destined to become an important vehi- cle for cross-border transactions, not so much globally, but in Asia. This argument is lent plausibility by China’s strong trade ties with its Asian neighbors. It is supported by the fact that China has been running persistent trade deﬁcits with the rest of Asia, thereby enabling other Asian countries to accumulate the renminbi-denominated reserves needed to operate a renminbi-based system (Chey 2012).5 Swift data on international payments are consistent with these presumptions. Although they show that the renminbi is the ve- hicle for less than 3 percent of payments worldwide, it is already used in the majority of payments with China and Hong Kong. 因此, if the renminbi is to play an international role, it is most likely to do so in Asia where it has special advantages. This can be argued on three grounds. 第一的, China and other Asian countries are natural economic partners. 李, 李, and Ding (2004) document the existence of an exceptionally large elasticity of China’s imports from other East Asian economies with respect to Chinese GDP. Given the prospect of rapid Chinese GDP growth, they conclude that China will become the largest trading economy in East Asia in the next 20 年, with about half of its imports coming from the region. According to data from the General Administration of Customs of China, China’s imports from ma- jor East Asian economies (香港, 日本, 韩国, 印度, and ASEAN) already account for 38 percent of its total imports, and imports from Asia as a whole (including the West and Central Asian countries) represent 55 percent of its total imports (estimates for 2014). 5 China’s trade structure is characterized by a trade surplus with developed countries in North America and Europe and a trade deﬁcit with economies in East Asia. This can, 反过来, facilitate renminbi-based exports in the emerging East Asian economies. 51 Asian Economic Papers l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / 直接的 . 米特 . / e d u a s e p a r t i c e – 压力 / 的f / / / / / 1 6 1 3 5 1 6 8 5 1 6 3 a s e p _ a _ 0 0 4 8 3 压力 . 来宾来访 0 8 九月 2 0 2 3 RMBI or RMBR? Is the Renminbi Destined to Become a Global or Regional Currency? Underlying these patterns is the fact that trade costs still matter importantly for cross- border commercial transactions, and distance is still relevant to trade costs (看, 例如, 一个- derson and van Wincoop 2004). Transport costs are a signiﬁcant portion of total trade costs (where the latter include also costs of insurance, time in transit, and local distribu- 的). Abe and Wilson (2009), for their part, conﬁrm that transport costs increase with distance. 更普遍, these costs can be inferred from differences in the prices of the same products in different countries. Feenstra (1998) famously contrasts the cost in dif- ferent markets of Mattel’s Barbie doll), from the difference between the inclusive cost of insurance and freight and free on board prices, and from the predominant mode of trans- portation (and from the posted costs of utilizing that mode). 为了确定, the association of transport costs with distance varies with the presence or absence of natural ports, long coastlines, and mountain ranges. But none of this changes the fact that Asian countries, 和, 尤其, those that border the South China Sea, are natural trade partners. Another way of gauging whether economies are natural trade partners is on the basis of relative resource endowments. There is no question that resource endowments vary widely within Asia. 例如, China is poorly endowed in certain natural resources compared with some of its Asian neighbors: It possesses little in the way of clean fossil fu- els compared with, 说, Malaysia, and is the world’s largest petroleum importer. 更远, its labor force peaked in 2010, 和, 因此, unskilled labor is becoming increasingly scarce relative to say, 印度尼西亚, 印度, and Bangladesh. It follows that China will export goods embodying skilled and semi-skilled labor and capital and import goods that make more intensive use of raw materials, 活力, and unskilled labor—again making Asian countries like Indonesia, 印度, and Bangladesh natural trading partners. Consistent with this presumption, trade among the economies in question has been growing more rapidly than global trade, and more rapidly than China’s trade overall. l 从http下载 : / / 直接的 . 米特 . / e d u a s e p a r t i c e – 压力 / 的f / / / / / 1 6 1 3 5 1 6 8 5 1 6 3 a s e p _ a _ 0 0 4 8 3 压力 . Another dimension is intra-industry trade. Because of the development of international supply chains, different countries specialize in different (垂直的) stages of a production process and produce different components of a ﬁnal product or set of products. This has been a large component of Asian trade ﬂows throughout the rapid economic development of Asia since the mid 1980s. China has long been involved in these regional supply chains, most prominently in the case of consumer electronics, importing semiconductors from Japan, 韩国, and Taiwan, and combining them with other components before ex- porting a ﬁnal product. 在需求方面, it is likely that Asia will become an increas- ingly important destination for these Chinese products, as these countries increase income and wealth per capita and develop their middle classes. 因此, intra-industry trade between China and other Asian countries is likely to increase further, which will pro- vide consistent momentum for intra-industry trade and for renminbi use for cross-border transactions in the region. 来宾来访 0 8 九月 2 0 2 3 52 Asian Economic Papers RMBI or RMBR? Is the Renminbi Destined to Become a Global or Regional Currency? One objection is that many of the supply chains in which China is involved are global, and not regional; the country imports iPhone design from Sunnyvale, 加利福尼亚州, before exporting the assembled product back to the United States. But with the articulation of supply chains, production has grown increasingly susceptible to disruption by climatic and political shocks. As these risks come to be better appreciated, producers have relo- cated supply chain-related production to sites closer to the point of ﬁnal sale, which are less susceptible to natural and economic disruptions and where political conditions, by virtue of their proximity, are better understood. A case in point is how U.S. ﬁrms in a va- riety of industries have relocated the production of components from China and other Asian countries to Mexico. These observations point to the likelihood that we will con- tinue to observe the disproportionate growth of intra-Asian trade. An abundance of evidence suggests that distance also continues to play a role in interna- tional ﬁnancial transactions. Portes, Rey, and Oh (2001) study cross-border ﬁnancial trans- actions in U.S. equities and bonds and show that distance still matters after controlling for other determinants of the volume of these transactions. Analyzing FDI ﬂows, Brainard (1997), 高 (2009), and Paniagua (2011) show that such ﬂows vary inversely and signif- icantly with distance. Di Giovanni (2002) shows that distance matters for cross-border mergers-and-acquisitions-related capital ﬂows. The association between cross-border ﬁnancial ﬂows and proximity presumably reﬂects costs of information acquisition and corporate control, which historically have tended to increase with distance. To the extent that this remains the case today, the observation points to the disproportionate growth of cross-border ﬁnancial transactions within Asia and a role for the dominant regional currency in those transactions. A second basis for arguing that the renminbi is likely to be an important vehicle for cross- border transactions mainly in Asia points to Beijing’s Asia-speciﬁc institutional and pol- icy initiatives. China’s Silk Road Initiative was designed to promote trade and economic integration in Central Asia. Also known as the “Belt and Road Initiative,” this was laid out by President Xi Jinping in visits to Central and Southeast Asia in 2013 and has been backed by the country’s National Development and Reform Commission. The plan en- visages enhanced connectivity within and among Asia, 欧洲, and Africa via land and adjacent sea routes, although it appears to be centered on Central and Southeast Asia. The Silk Road Economic Belt will run along the historic Silk Road trade route, which stretches from coastal China through Central Asia, and the Maritime Silk Road will connect China’s south with Southeast Asia. Although focused on transport and other forms of physical infrastructure, the Silk Road Initiative is also intended to encompass trade facilitation, ﬁnancial cooperation, and cultural exchange. Insofar as it achieves its goal of reducing transport costs, cultural barriers, and other obstacles, it has the potential to deepen, 一方面, trade and ﬁnancial interaction with China, and on the other hand, Southeast 53 Asian Economic Papers l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / 直接的 . 米特 . / e d u a s e p a r t i c e – 压力 / 的f / / / / / 1 6 1 3 5 1 6 8 5 1 6 3 a s e p _ a _ 0 0 4 8 3 压力 . 来宾来访 0 8 九月 2 0 2 3 RMBI or RMBR? Is the Renminbi Destined to Become a Global or Regional Currency? and Central Asian countries, thereby enhancing the attractiveness of use of the renminbi in this region. China also participates in a number of regional initiatives together with ASEAN coun- 尝试. 如前所述, it signed an FTA with ASEAN in 2002, which came into effect in 2010. An FTA agreement with South Korea has also recently been signed. These agree- ments encourage additional trade ﬂows between China and its Asian partners, have been responsible for some movement in the direction of freer trade in the region, and signal more of the same in the future. Moving from trade to ﬁnancial integration, China was a founding member of the Asian Bond Market Initiative (ABMI) established by the ASEAN+3 countries following the 1997–98 Asian ﬁnancial crisis. The ABMI is intended to promote the growth and inte- gration of regional debt security markets, and markets in local currency debt securities in particular, by sharing information on best practices and applying pressure for adop- 的. It was then followed by the creation by the same countries of an Asian Bond Market Forum (ABMF) of regular meetings between private-sector experts and ofﬁcials with the goal of harmonizing regulation and standardizing market practices across the region, in this case with the explicit goal of promoting cross-border transactions in local-currency- denominated debt securities. Insofar as standardization includes standardization on a speciﬁc local currency, the currency in question will plausibly be that of the largest issuer: 中国. 更远, China is, along with Japan, the largest contributor to the Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization (CMIM) through which the ASEAN+3 countries have agreed to ex- tend swap lines and credits to one another. This is a regional supplement to the global network of central bank swap lines, including the PBOC swap lines described earlier. It was established in 2000 as the Chiang Mai Initiative, a network of bilateral swaps, and reorganized in 2010, nominally as a single reserve pool, now amounting to US$ 240 曾是-
狮子. 中国 (including Hong Kong) and Japan each contribute 32 percent of the collec-
tive reserve pool (for national contributions see Table 10). Most of these arrangements
are speciﬁed as swaps of local currencies for U.S. 美元, but four (China–Japan, China–
菲律宾, China–Korea, and Japan–Korea) involve the partners’ local currencies. 在广告中-
dition to the practical uses of swap arrangements, the CMIM and the other China–ASEAN
initiatives signal that China and ASEAN are willing to cooperate in developing a larger
regional network.

Like other swaps, the availability of local-currency lines of credit through the CMIM
will encourage regulators to permit banks and ﬁrms under their jurisdiction to incur
exposures in foreign currencies, since local central banks gain the power to engage
in at least limited last-resort lending in those currencies. It is worth noting that the

Asian Economic Papers

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RMBI or RMBR? Is the Renminbi Destined to Become a Global or Regional Currency?

桌子 10. CMI multilateralization contributions, purchasing, 和
表决

Total voting

Financial contribution
USD (十亿) 百分比 (%) 多种的

Purchasing power

中国 (Mainland)A
香港, 中国
日本
韩国
Plus 3
印度尼西亚
Thailand
Malaysia
新加坡
菲律宾
越南
Cambodia
缅甸
Brunei
Lao PDR
ASEAN
全部的

68.40
8.40
76.80
38.40
192

9.104
9.104
9.104
9.104
9.104
2.00
0.24
0.12
0.06
0.06
48
240

0.5
2.5
0.5
1

2.5
2.5
2.5
2.5
2.5
5
5
5
5
5

28.5
3.5
32
16
80
3.793
3.793
3.793
3.793
3.793
0.833
0.1
0.05
0.025
0.025
20
100

百分 (%)

25.43
2.98
28.41
14.77
71.59
4.369
4.369
4.369
4.369
4.369
1.847
1.222
1.179
1.158
1.158
28.41
100

来源: ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Ofﬁce (2015). 看: www.amro-asia.org

笔记: A. 中国, including Hong Kong, contributes US$ 76.80 billion and has 28.41% of the voting shares. renminbi is the currency that appears most frequently in this connection (in three out of four cases). The CMIM thus provides a natural institutional platform for the renminbi in the ASEAN+3 region. Use of the renminbi by commercial banks and enterprises in the region should in turn encourage Asian central banks to hold more renminbi in their reserve portfolios, thus enabling them to stabilize the renminbi–local currency exchange rate and act as lender of last resort in renminbi to the banks and ﬁrms in question. 实际上, the majority of ASEAN+3 central banks already have indicated that they have added the renminbi to their reserve portfolios. Early adopters include Malaysia, Cambodia, the Philippines, Sin- gapore, and Thailand (for the complete list see Table 11). A further basis for arguing that the renminbi’s future is as an international currency in Asia builds on the same observations as in Section 3 but applies to it a different spin. The vast majority of exchange rates in whose determination the renminbi now has the great- est weight are Asian currencies. The countries with the largest RQFII quotas (香港, 新加坡, and Taiwan) are Asian countries. The Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect, which removes barriers between equity markets in Shanghai and offshore, speciﬁcally re- moves those barriers between Shanghai and a principal Asian market. 而且, the ﬁrst seven countries with direct trading of their local currencies against the renminbi (Laos, Kazakhstan, 越南, 韩国, Thailand, 日本, and Australia) were all Asian countries, as were the ﬁrst countries to add the renminbi to their reserve portfolios (Hong Kong and Malaysia). 55 Asian Economic Papers l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / 直接的 . 米特 . / e d u a s e p a r t i c e – 压力 / 的f / / / / / 1 6 1 3 5 1 6 8 5 1 6 3 a s e p _ a _ 0 0 4 8 3 压力 . 来宾来访 0 8 九月 2 0 2 3 RMBI or RMBR? Is the Renminbi Destined to Become a Global or Regional Currency? 桌子 11. RMB as ofﬁcial reserve by country Country Datea Amount Type Norway Malaysia Hong Kong Belarus Venezuela Kenya Chile Nigeria Cambodia Philippines Russia Singapore Thailand Austria Japan Uruguay Macao Bolivia Indonesia Korea Saudi Arabia Tanzania Pakistan Angola Australia Nepal South Africa Taiwan Lithuania Namibia Ghana France Switzerland Sri Lanka Argentina United Kingdom Zimbabwe Hungary October 2006 九月 2010 十月 2010 十一月 2010 八月 2011 八月 2011 九月 2011 九月 2011 十月 2011 十月 2011 十月 2011 十月 2011 十一月 2011 十一月 2011 十二月 2011 2012a March 2012 可能 2012 七月 2012 七月 2012 七月 2012 八月 2012 十月 2012 四月 2013 四月 2013 六月 2013 六月 2013 十月 2013 十一月 2013 十二月 2013 四月 2014 四月 2014 七月 2014 九月 2014 九月 2014 十月 2014 十月 2014 可能 2015 最多 $1.5 BN
undisclosed
5−10% ($16−$31 bn)
undisclosed
undisclosed
undisclosed
2.3% ($945 mn) 2−7% ($2.3–$4.6 bn) undisclosed undisclosed undisclosed up to $1 BN
0.5% ($836 mn) undisclosed $10.3 BN
$0.21 BN 15.5% ($2.5 BN)
0.4% ($58 mn) undisclosed $3.3 BN
undisclosed
undisclosed
undisclosed
undisclosed
$1.6 bn undisclosed $1.5 BN
undisclosed
最多 $100 mn undisclosed undisclosed undisclosed up to $2.5 BN
undisclosed
$1.3 BN $490 mn
undisclosed
undisclosed

陆上
sovereign
sovereign
陆上
undisclosed
undisclosed
undisclosed
offshore
undisclosed
undisclosed
undisclosed
陆上
off & 陆上
陆上
sovereign
offshore
off &陆上
offshore
陆上
陆上
undisclosed
offshore
陆上
offshore
sovereign
陆上
off & 陆上
undisclosed
陆上
offshore
undisclosed
sovereign
陆上
陆上
undisclosed
offshore
undisclosed
undisclosed

来源: Liao and McDowell (2015), Xinhua News.

笔记: A. Missing month for Uruguay.

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最后, insofar as political power and leverage matter for international currency use, 它
is worth noting that China is best able to project such power and inﬂuence in the South
China Sea and elsewhere in Asia. In terms of economic inﬂuence, there is no doubt
that China plays a large role for Asian countries like Thailand, Malaysia, and Viet-
nam, as China is one of their most important trade and ﬁnancial partners. Consistent
with this, Asian countries’ willingness to participate in institutional arrangements with
China reﬂects the fact that the same countries, 也, beneﬁt from these relationships. 全部
these are reasons for believing that the renminbi’s future is as a leading regional, 不是
全球的, currency.

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5. 结论

Forecasting is difﬁcult. Any forecast about whether the renminbi’s future is as a global
or regional currency should therefore be taken with a grain of salt. Instead of forecasting,

Asian Economic Papers

RMBI or RMBR? Is the Renminbi Destined to Become a Global or Regional Currency?

所以, we have done our best in this paper to make the cases for both scenarios. Nei-
ther theory nor history points unambiguously in either direction, and modern evidence
can be marshaled in support of either view. 一方面, China has increasingly
important economic, ﬁnancial, and political links with countries not only in Asia, 但
throughout the world, just as China invests globally, not just in Asia. Many of China’s
policy initiatives, such as its bilateral free trade agreements, designating Chinese banks
as ofﬁcial renminbi clearing banks for foreign ﬁnancial centers, and concluding renminbi
swap arrangements with foreign central banks, extend also to countries in Europe and the
Western Hemisphere. These observations suggest that as Chinese ﬁnancial markets gain
depth and liquidity, the renminbi will assume a role not merely as a currency used in set-
tling trade-related transactions, where it already functions, but also as an investment and
reserve currency, not just in Asia but globally.

同时, 然而, some of China’s most natural economic, ﬁnancial, and po-
litical links are with neighboring Asian countries. Transport costs are still important for
international trade, and they are lowest over short distances. Distance also matters for
international ﬁnancial transactions, whether because local knowledge dissipates with
distance or because certain ﬁnancial transactions are more costly across multiple time
zones. These facts make China and other Asian countries logical commercial and ﬁnan-
cial partners. Asian countries that see themselves as sharing common characteristics, 和
speciﬁcally common economic and ﬁnancial vulnerabilities, have responded with regional
initiatives like the ABMI, Asian Bond Forum, Asian Bond Fund, CMIM, and ASEAN–
China FTA, all of which work to further deepen economic and ﬁnancial integration in
the region. This suggests that the renminbi, as the currency of the largest Asian economy
and leading trader, has a natural habitat in the region, and that its future is as the leading
Asian currency.

As for which scenario is more likely, one can only echo Zhoa Enlai (speaking not of the
French Revolution but of the French student demonstrations of 1968, in actual fact), 那它
is too early to tell. This paper at least identiﬁes some of the principal factors on which the
answer will hinge.

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Comments by Doo Yong Yang, on RMBI or RMBR?
Is the Renminbi Destined to Become a
Global or Regional Currency?

Doo Yong Yang: This paper analyzes the issue of Chinese renminbi (RMB) 内部-
tionalization. The authors investigate whether the RMB will become a global or re-
gional currency based on China’s economic conditions and institutional development.
This issue is related to the process of internationalization of the RMB, which includes
market-driven factors.

This issue of Chinese RMB started with the internationalization of the RMB in the late
2000s. 在 2009, China established the dim sum bond market and expanded cross-border
RMB settlement, which helped establish pools of offshore RMB liquidity. 自那以后, RMB
internationalization has accelerated. 在 2013, the Chinese RMB was the eighth most traded
currency in the world and the seventh most traded in early 2014. 到年底 2014, 这
RMB ranked ﬁfth as the most traded currency. In terms of interest rate derivative, 它是
amount is now ranked as tenth. Government efforts on pilot schemes and related liber-
alization measures with political motivation are behind this acceleration.

Market-driven factors also contributed to the internationalization of the RMB. 第一的, 一个
increase in international trade, especially with Asian countries, has played an important
角色. The rapid increase of trade with ASEAN and other Asian countries created an op-
portunity for both sides to use the RMB as a settlement currency. 还, China’s export
to the world has dramatically increased since early 2000s. 最后, production fragmen-
tation and the vertical integration of supply chains have contributed to regional trade
with China.

此外, the continuous appreciation of the RMB has contributed to its rapid interna-
tionalization. The appreciation of the RMB and the expectation of its continuous appre-
ciation of the RMB has encouraged foreign exporters to settle their trades with the RMB.
Even though the imbalanced currency settlement in China has prevailed, the use of the
RMB as a settlement has increased. According to recent studies (Mehl and Fratzscher
2011; Subramanian and Kessler 2012), the use of the RMB in trade settlement has in-
creased consequences for the RMB as a reserve currency.

Several factors, 然而, will challenge the current trend of the increasing role of the
RMB as a global or regional currency. First of all, development of ﬁnancial markets and

Asian Economic Papers 16:1

C(西德:3) 2017 by the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology

土井:10.1162/ASEP_a_00484

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RMB internationalization are incompatible. The internationalization of the yuan requires
convertibility and liberalization of the capital account. Because of the fragility of the ﬁnan-
cial system and its lack of attractive ﬁnancial instruments, 然而, China’s liberalization
of the capital account and hence the internationalization of the RMB might increase the
probability of a ﬁnancial crisis. Prasad and Ye (2012) propose a broader range of policy
reforms—especially those related to ﬁnancial market development, exchange rate ﬂexi-
能力, and capital account liberalization—as necessary steps that must be taken before the
RMB can be used more internationally.

The current monetary and ﬁnancial conditions are unfavorable to RMB internationaliza-
的. As mentioned, the strong value of the RMB against the U.S. dollar might be the rea-
son for the recent increase in use of the Chinese yuan. 尽管如此, it seems that it will
not be easy to maintain the strong RMB in times of U.S. interest hikes. This will hurt the
role of the RMB as a regional currency.

The role of the RMB as a regional currency might be exaggerated. 在本文中, the au-
thors estimate the role of the RMB in Asia by estimating the Frankel and Wei regressions,
where the value of the local currency against a numeraire (在这种情况下, the Swiss franc).
The model is as follows:

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(西德:3)

(西德:2)

dln

Xt
C H Ft

(西德:2)

= p1

∗ dln

+ p4

∗ dln

(西德:3)

(西德:2)

U S$t C H Ft (西德:2) J PYt C H Ft ∗ dln + p2 (西德:3) + A + et , (西德:3) RMBt C H Ft + p3 ∗ dln (西德:3) (西德:2) EU Rt C H Ft (1) In this estimation, there is a multicollinearity problem. The coefﬁcient p2 might not be properly interpreted, because there are strong correlations between the yuan and the U.S. dollar. 综上所述, it is natural that the RMB will be a global and regional currency as China becomes the world’s second largest economy, largest trading nation, and the largest for- eign reserves. For the next several years, 然而, the RMB will be challenged as the re- gional and global currency. References Mehl, Arnaud, and Marcel Fratzscher. 2011. China’s Dominance Hypothesis and the Emer- gence of a Tripolar Global Currency System. European Central Bank Working Paper. Available at https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpwps/ecbwp1392.pdf?efc669e7d00e51e4a3c38d4e5ed180c3 Prasad Eswar, and Lei Ye. 2012. Will the Renminbi Rule? IMF Finance & 发展 49(1). 可在 http 上获取://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2012/03/prasad.htm 61 Asian Economic Papers Comments Subramanian, Arvind, and Martin Kessler. 2012. The Renminbi Bloc is Here: Asia Down, Rest of the World to Go? Peterson Institute for International Economics Working Paper. Available at https://piie.com/publications/working-papers/renminbi-bloc-here-asia-down-rest-world-go Comments by Shigeyuki Abe, on RMBI or RMBR? Is the Renminbi Destined to Become a Global or Regional Currency? Shigeyuki Abe: This paper gives an interesting and informative analysis through a su- perb literature survey and empirical tests of whether the renminbi (RMB) can be either a global or a regional currency. The idea set at the beginning is clear and the authors’ conclusion is sharp because both negative and positive arguments for the RMB as a key currency are explained and no concrete future direction is shown, reﬂecting the fact that the paper has not only two views but also two authors. Negative arguments are that the RMB is different from the US$, China has dubious macro
统计数据, and global currency requires more than RMB. The US$ was initially linked with gold until 1971 and hysteresis has kept the US$ as a strong global currency. Global cur-
rency rests on amazingly high score macro statistics, but China has questionable macro
统计数据. 尤其, important conditions that China does not fulﬁll include free trade,
free capital movement, and an independent central bank.

Positive arguments are such that China can exist in the vacuum of world leaders—
即, G7, which is obsolete, and G20, which is a mess. The Asian Infrastructure Invest-
ment Bank is well recognized, with the support of major countries except Japan and the
美国. Another positive argument is that the increasing share in Special Drawing
Rights composition supports the RMB as a key currency too.

Surely, the share of RMB in world trade is substantially increasing, but this is more or less
the result of China’s government-led strategy. It is quite a contrast to the case of Japan.
许久, the Japanese government has tried to make the yen an international cur-
rency, albeit with no success. This is because private Japanese corporations have been
hesitant to use yen for transactions and have been using US$ more to avoid the risk of exchange rate ﬂuctuations. Chinese ﬁrms listen to and obey the Chinese government’s intention and use RMB for transactions; this results in increases of the RMB share. 一 62 Asian Economic Papers l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / 直接的 . 米特 . / e d u a s e p a r t i c e – 压力 / 的f / / / / / 1 6 1 3 5 1 6 8 5 1 6 3 a s e p _ a _ 0 0 4 8 3 压力 . 来宾来访 0 8 九月 2 0 2 3 Comments fear that the RMB cannot be global or even regional rests on the behavior of Chinese ﬁrms in the future (since someday they might use RMB less and US$ more—just like
Japanese corporations).

The assertion that the RMB can be global like the US$ is self-contradicting. The US$ is
and will remain a global currency in the future, and there will be no chance for the RMB
to replace the US$. This means that the future situation for the RMB, although global, is different from the current US$ dominant situation (IE。, two currencies, RMB and US$, coexist as global currency). Two factors not discussed in the paper are the price-setting mechanism of most commodi- ties including oil and the size of foreign exchange reserves of China and the United States. Major commodities are traded constantly on commodity exchanges around the world such as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the New York Mercantile Exchange. 是- cause inﬂuential markets are in the United States and prices are set in US$, the US$ has strong advantage over the RMB in this regard. If one compares foreign exchange reserves, 美国. advantage is clearer: As of May 2016, China has the largest, 3,507 trillion US$
值得, whereas the United States has 119 trillion US$ worth, 0.9 percent of that of China.1 In other words, the United States does not have to hold much foreign exchange reserves These ﬁgures alone show that it is not likely for the RMB to play the role of the US$ in the
near future.

The RMB can be regional as long as China ties the usage of RMB with ofﬁcial devel-
opment assistance and trade. Even this depends on how much inﬂuence the Chinese
government continues to successfully exert on the private sector with regard to RMB
for transactions.

土井:10.1162/ASEP_a_00485

1 IMF. Data Template on International Reserves and Foreign Currency Liquidity. 可用于
http://data.imf.org/?sk=1117171F-7E11–4E80-A28E-439E4F3D1EEF&ss=1450382449040.

Asian Economic Papers

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Summary of the General Discussion on
“RMBI or RMBR? Is the Renminbi Destined
to Become a Global or Regional Currency?”

Anwar Nasution emphasized that the approach to the question of the RMB’s internation-
alization should be based on the role of money (IE。, as a medium of exchange, store of
价值, unit of account). 从这个角度来看, he feels that the basic role of the RMB as
money is difﬁcult to fulﬁll. China has limited technology. He cited examples such as an
iPad’s parts being made elsewhere and simply assembled in China, as well as the fact that
one cannot simply buy high-technology items such as a Boeing 747 from China owing to
limited technology in China. The medium of exchange function will therefore have dif-
ﬁculty being met by the RMB as there is not much of value that can be bought in China.
Tight capital controls in China also mean that there is no wide international trading of the
RMB. The legal system necessary is also absent; there are high transaction costs because
of the RMB’s non-convertibility, and so given that the basic role of money is difﬁcult to
meet, it will take time for the RMB to be internationalized.

Chalongphob Sussangkarn said the distinction between the RMB becoming a regional
versus a global currency is confusing given that China’s relationship with the rest of the
world is global. He expects the share of the RMB to increase. He asks whether the RMB
be China-centric (trade between China and other countries), or will the RMB become the
currency of choice by third-party trade and investment, as this is not the case today. 他
sees the need to make the use of the RMB less expensive and to make it attractive for peo-
ple to hold RMB by reducing capital controls. He feels that all this will take a long time
to unfold.

Lars Oxelheim noted that RMB internationalization is a tricky topic with two models be-
ing used. Two percent of RMB use is related to trade and 98 percent is due to speculation.
The choice of currency is made by decision makers in society. He asserted that it is pre-
mature for the RMB to be a reserve currency unless the known preconditions for an opti-
mum currency area (OCA) are fulﬁlled. There is a lack of transparency and deregulation
in China. He said that the next step in the research would be to assess whether Asia is an
OCA. 换句话说, the authors can try to calculate the beneﬁts and costs of the RMB
becoming like the euro is to Europe.

Sisira Jayasuriya pointed out that as the discussion is about the future, in terms of
贸易, distance is diminishing and should, by itself, should not be a major factor. 什么

Asian Economic Papers 16:1

C(西德:3) 2017 by the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology

土井:10.1162/ASEP_a_00486

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General Discussion

are the conditions under which China’s currency will become global—with capital
account liberalization?

Some discussions could be misleading. China is a capitalist country with many distor-
系统蒸发散. Chinese currency trade is a small proportion of the total so how can an RMB depre-
ciation of 4.4 percent be seen as chaotic? If there is no volatility in the exchange rate, 那里
simply won’t be trade in the currency. Looking forward, currencies of major countries
become important.

Toshihiro Okubo stated that in the long run, the more important aspect is the interaction
with the real economy. The issue of OCA is similar to this discussion.

Wing Thye Woo pointed to the importance of GDP size, how open the ﬁnancial market is,
and the state of the rule of law. 在 2050, we may see China and India being of equal size.
On the rule of law, India may have the rule of law but with low-quality implementation.
The rupee might pose a challenge to the RMB. He also asked the question of how many
currencies can be accommodated in the region.

Domenico Lombardi responded and pointed out that he and his co-author do not claim
that the RMB will supplant the U.S. dollar, but simply that the RMB will become an in-
ternational currency in the future. The share of RMB payments goes up and down. 这
authors noted that China has capital controls but the point is that they are looking at a
longer-term scenario.

He emphasized that the issue of the region being an OCA is not really the point they are
制作. Traders hold euros not because Tunisia is more integrated with Europe.

On GDP size, he noted that if you are an issuer of currency and you are very large, 这
may have implications on internationalization.

He also stated that although the rupee might become a global currency, this was not the
focus of their paper.

Asian Economic Papers

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3 RMBI or RMBR? Is the Renminbi Destined to image

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