아시아 통화금융협력 촉진방안으로서의 지역통화단위(RCU) 도입

Regional currency unit(RCU) has been suggested as an idea to promote East Asian monetary and financial cooperation. The objective of this paper is to examine various technical issues surrounding RCU and to suggest how RCU can be used to enhance monetary and financial integration in East Asia. The most important considerations in the composition of RCU are: each currency's value should be properly reflected in RCU; and an asymmetry problem among member currencies should be resolved. Thus the weight assigned to each currency should reflect the country's GDP based on PPP, its size of intra-regional transaction and its contribution to CMIM. Also, the base year should be chosen so that in that year total international transactions of member countries are as close to balance as possible and their balances with the rest of the world are also as close to zero as possible. Also, to prevent a country's weight from being dominant and to avoid an asymmetry problem, we need to put an upper limit to the weight of strong currencies and periodically revise the weights of currencies included in RCU. If RCU is to play a pivotal role for monetary and financial integration in East Asia, it needs to be widely used for surveillance and for intra-regional transaction. For this purpose, what's needed the most is to use RCA as an indicator to monitor how individual currencies diverge inside the region and how Asian currencies are moving collectively vis-à-vis key external currencies such as the US dollar and the euro. At the same time, RCU can be used for transaction in private capital markets as a denomination of market transactions and as a useful instrument for the introduction of a regional settlement system to link regional financial markets. However, to strengthen the role of RCU, it would be desirable to create a regional exchange rate arrangement among East Asian countries.