An Empirical Analysis of Current Account Determinants in Emerging Asian Economies

Limited empirical work has been done to the diverging current account balances of the individual emerging Asian economies. Based on the intertemporal approach to current account, this paper empirically examines both the long-run and short-run impacts of initial stock of net foreign assets, degree of openness to international trade, real exchange rate and relative income on current account balances for eight selected emerging Asian economies over the period 1980-2009, making use of the cointegrated VAR (Vector Autoregression) methodology. This paper finds that current account behaviours in emerging Asian economies are heterogeneous. Initial stock of net foreign assets and degree of openness to international trade are important factors in explaining the long-run behaviour of current accounts. Moreover, the current accounts of all sample economies have a self-adjusting mechanism except China. Short-run current account adjustment towards long-run equilibrium path is gradual, with the disequilibrium term being the main determinant of the short-run current account variations.