11/5/2021 | 14th Annual Conference on China’s Economic Development and U.S.-China Economic Relations

The Institute for International Economic Policy is pleased to invite you to the 14th annual Conference on China’s Economic Development and U.S.-China Economic Relations. This year, the conference will take place as a virtual series. This conference is co-sponsored by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and the GW Center for International Business Education and Research (GW-CIBER).

In this event, HKU’s Edwin Lai will discuss his recent book titled “One Currency, Two Markets: China’s Attempt to Internationalize the Renminbi.” In this book he discusses economic analysis of the future of the international monetary system and the USD, and the rising importance of the RMB. It points out the unsustainability of the dollar standard in the long run, that China has unique incentives to internationalize its currency, and how Hong Kong plays an important role. It explains the real reasons for China to internationalize its currency, including using external commitments to force financial sector reforms (‘daobi’ in Chinese). It applies economic theories accessible to laymen to establish that financial development and openness are crucial for RMB internationalization to succeed, and that greater exchange rate volatility is inevitable due to the ‘open-economy trilemma’. Employing the ‘gravity model’, the book predicts quantitatively that the RMB is likely to be a distant third payment currency after the USD and the euro, but surpassing the Japanese yen in the next decade.

Speaker

Edwin Lai is Professor of Economics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology since July 2009, and later jointly appointed as the Director of the Center for Economic Development and jointly appointed as Professor in the Division of Public Policy. He was Senior Research Economist and Adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas of the Federal Reserve System of the USA, from August 2007 to June 2009. Before that he was Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University, Associate Professor at City University of Hong Kong and Associate Professor at Singapore Management University. His main research areas are international economics, industrial organization, growth and internationalization of renminbi. He is a leading scholar in the study of intellectual property rights in the global economy. He has published in American Economic Review, RAND Journal of Economics, International Economic Review, Journal of International Economics and other highly respected journals in economics.

Prof. Lai has been a consultant to the World Bank, visiting scholar/fellow with Boston University, Princeton University, Kobe University, CESifo (University of Munich), Hitotsubashi University and Hong Kong Institute for Monetary Research. He is Associate Editor of Review of International Economics (Wiley Publisher), a Fellow of the CESifo Research Network (U of Munich) and a board member of Asia-Pacific Trade Seminars (APTS) Group. He obtained his B.Sc. in engineering from University of Hong Kong and A.M. and Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University.