미국의 동아시아 경제정책에 관한 소고 -동아시아 경제위기를 중심으로-

A Study on the U.S. Economic Policy Toward East Asia -With Special Reference to the East Asian Economic Crisis-

One irony of the recent economic crisis in East Asia is that although the crisis management has been mainly conducted by the IMF and the U.S. government, there exist few literature that analyze the U.S. policy toward the crisis in the context of its foreign economic policy. This paper is an attempt to partially remedy this deficiency. An analysis of the U.S. foreign economic policy is as complex as its foreign policy analysis. For the sake of analytic simplicity without losing generality, I hope, this paper only considers international political economic factors, domestic economic factors, and cultural factors in the formulation of the policy. Cultural factors are included here in view of the unusually strong cultural and ideological contents in the IMF conditionality. Huntington's paradigm of the clash of civilization is employed to explain this cultural factor in the post- Cold War international order led by the U.S. Some characteristic features of the U.S. policy have been obtained by analyzing records of congressional hearings, newspaper reports and statements made by policy makers. For instance, financial interests overwhelmed trade interests reflecting a growing importance of the financial sector in the U.S. economy. The long-term interest of opening the East Asian market was a dominant factor in the early response, but gradually replaced by the shot- term interest of financial stability as the financial crisis threatened global financial markets. It also shows that the utility of APEC, which has been an instrument of regional cooperation in the Asia-Pacific, is diminishing as the U.S. is gaining clear hegemony through the management of the crisis. Despite the growing need for regional cooperation among the East Asian countries, it is unlikely to be materialized because of the strong opposition by the U.S. and the lack of leadership in East Asia. In the meantime, the East Asian economies will converge toward American model of capitalism but the institutional change remains to be a critical factor in the economic relations between the U.S. and East Asia.