Asia and the liberal global financial system

Between 30 August and 1 September 2023, we organised the second StateCapFinance workshop titled “Asia and the liberal global financial system: contestation, compliance or cooptation?” together with Fabian Pape (LSE) and Lena Rethel (University of Warwick) at Goethe University Frankfurt.

The rules, norms, and procedures that govern cross-border money and finance are central cornerstones of the global economy. In the liberal financial order, the underlying principles which inform this governance of finance enable the free flow of capital across borders as well as the creation of private profit to achieve ‘efficient’ allocation of resources. These norms of how the global financial system ought to operate were largely put in place by the United States and followed by European states. Asia now accounts for an increasing share of the global financial system. In 2020, Asian financial systems accounted for 34.3%, 43.1% and 29.3% of global bond, stock, and futures markets, respectively. However, contemporary analyses of the global financial order tend to neglect the growing importance of Asia: either the focus is on China’s challenge of liberal markets or (other) Asian countries are analysed and compared at a national or regional level. This workshop aimed to bridge these levels of analysis by exploring the globalisation of Asian financial systems/actors and their relationship with the liberal financial order, exploring questions such as:

How do Asian financial actors integrate into the global financial system?
Do they contest, co-opt, or comply with liberal norms of market organisation?
How do they enact economic and financial statecraft, and what responses do they face in international markets?
How do global financial actors interact with Asian financial systems?
What are the geopolitical and geoeconomic implications of these developments?

This international workshop brought together 13 participants from 8 countries (plus 4 virtual participants) in order to explore the changing role of Asia within the global financial system.

Fumihito Gotoh, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
Chen Li, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Chunzi Miao, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Fathimath Musthaq, Reed College, USA
Moch Faisal Karim, Bina Nusantara University, Indonesia
Yaechan Lee, Boston University, USA
Jesslene Lee, University of Toronto, Canada
Lena Rethel, University of Warwick, UK
Apolline Simons, University of Warwick, UK
Fabian Pape, London School of Economics, UK
Robyn Klingler Vidra, Kings Business School, UK
Jing Wang, NYU Shanghai, China
Horacio Ortiz, Fudan University, China
Soo Yeon Kim, National University of Singapore, Singapore (virtual)
Saori Katada, University of Southern California, USA (virtual)
Tim Summers, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong (virtual)
Shahar Hameiri, University of Queensland, Australia (virtual)
Johannes Petry (local host)

Before the workshop, we also held an event on ‘publishing in academic journals’ for early career researchers that was also attended by 10-15 people, mostly ECRs from Goethe University. This event was aimed at demystifying the academic publishing process, featuring a Q&A with a former journal editor (Lena Rethel, Review of International Political Economy) and an ‘open review’ session in which the review process was discussed based on a recently published paper by the organisers.