Regional and Inter-regional Financial Integration: ASEM Equity Markets

The first Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Summit in 1996 has provided the principal multilateral platform for interregional cooperation between the European and Asian countries. This book examines the equity market integration among 49 ASEM members both in EU and Asia, and to investigate whether such integration has changed after the Asian financial crisis in 1997-99 and the introduction of euro. This book contributes by applying co-integration techniques, within which correlation matrix and variance decomposition are used for daily equity indices, returns and volatilities among ASEM markets from January 1985 till December 2012, in order to test the degree of dependencies among equity markets. This book also covers theoretical background of financial integration, and presents an empirical study on regional integration by testing ASEM EU and ASEM Asia integration as a prerequisite for interregional integration of ASEM. Although a lot of research has been focused on equity market integration, the emphasis has mostly been on regional rather than interregional. This study concludes that these markets presented a moderate degree of integration before Asian crisis.