Last modified: 2015-11-24
Abstract
This paper examines current account sustainability of five countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN): Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. The ASEAN was established in 1967 to speed up economic growth and to bring about cultural growth and progress, stability and regional peace among the ASEAN countries. Greater integration makes the issue of long-term sustainability of these countries critical to each other’s prosperity. The paper uses the intertemporal solvency framework of Hakkio and Rush (1991) and Husted (1992) and cointegration methodology to test for a relation between exports and imports of the current account. Further, we estimate this long-run relationship using dynamic OLS. The results show that only Malaysia and Thailand have sustainable current account positions. Of the others, Indonesia, Philippines and Singapore have a statistically significant relation between exports and imports although it is not strong enough, and thus they continue to have vulnerable current account positions. The paper argues that monetary, trade and political reforms are necessary to reduce vulnerabilities in external positions.