Paper prepared for the Bank of Thailand International Symposium 2008, Bangkok, 7-8 November. Robert McCauley is Senior Advisor, Monetary and Economic Department of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel and Guonan Ma is Senior Economist, BIS Representative Office for Asia and the Pacific, in Hong Kong SAR. The views expressed in the paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the BIS. The authors thank Arvind Subramanian for his very constructive comments. Eric Chan and Magdalena Erdem provided excellent research support.
