GDP Center Co-Hosts AMRO Workshop on Regional Surveillance

The workshop, entitled “Scaling Up and Leveraging Regional Surveillance”, was sponsored by Boston University’s Global Development Policy (GDP) Center, the Kyoto University School of Government, the ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO), and the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership.

William Grimes, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of International Relations and Political Science at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and Core Faculty of the GDP Center, attended the October 4, 2018 workshop at the ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO) headquarters in Singapore on regional surveillance efforts.

AMRO is a new international organization charged with supporting the $240 billion dollar East Asian crisis support fund known as the Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization (CMIM). CMIM is one of several regional arrangements that are reshaping the global financial safety net. While effective economic surveillance is crucial to these arrangements’ mission to prevent and manage currency crises, there has been little study of how AMRO and others implement surveillance and coordinate with the International Monetary Fund.

The roundtable discussion convened a group of experts and academics to take stock of regional surveillance efforts to date and develop a vision for their further development. In particular, the workshop served as a platform for the sharing of experiences between IMF and regional financial arrangements (RFAs) and focused on how to scale up and leverage regional surveillance capacity and how to foster constructive collaboration between the IMF and RFAs.

This workshop was the first event in a two-year project led by Grimes and GDP Center Assistant Director William Kring and funded by the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership to contribute to the development of best practices in regional economic surveillance.