The Origins of International Banking in Asia: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

摘要

When considering the adoption of a monetary policy (hard versus floating peg) and its respective economic rationale (wiping out transaction costs? lowering costs associated with foreign borrowing? overcoming original sin?), one often forgets that monetary policy is made on a level of social organisation that is as much characterised by legal, political and technical (procedural) constraints as purely economic ones. As a consequence of such clustering, constraints should be considered as more than simply cumbersome impediments to be eliminated in order to enhance economic efficiency. Instead, they are fundamentally persistent and conducive to the recreation of any economic-institutional set-up and, by extension, co-responsible for the latter's evolution. Put differently, institutions and their innate constraints are serious business and one would make a mistake by neglecting to study them. This insight forms the backbone of Nishimura et al.'s Origins. It is underlined in the introduction (pp. 1-12), in which the editors endorse the importance of transcending the concern with macroeconomic efficiency when dealing with a topic like exchange banks.