Review of Pacific Basin Financial Markets and Policies

Fully sterilized intervention, an operation that involves a pure swap of foreign and domestic assets which leaves the money supply unchanged, gained it popularity through the experience among developed countries in the early 1980s. Ideally, it provides an independent policy tool that allows monetary authorities to pursue internal and external stabilization objectives simultaneously. In this paper, we employ a vector error correction model (VECM) to examine the dynamic interactions between exchange rate condition and policy reactions by Taiwanese monetary authorities, as Taiwan is ready to join the WTO and to help businesses take full advantages of e-commerce. We found that little efforts were made to sterilize interventions in the short term after an exchange rate shock occurred. The intention of not to sterilize interventions is to alleviate the exchange rate pressure by drastically changing domestic short term interest rates to force private sectors instantaneously adjust shares between domestic and foreign assets in their portfolios where there are speculative positions. Presumably, this official effort to avoid great fluctuations of exchange rates would offer businesses more freedoms in dealing with challenges in e-commerce environment. The result also suggests that, unlike the experience in developed countries, an independent monetary policy may not always be preferred by policy markers in small open economies.

This paper aims to study what factors affect the adoption of online trading towards brokers in Hong Kong. By using the adoption model, Decomposed Version Theory of Planned Behavior (DTPB), we identify the factors that affect brokers towards online trading. A hypothesized model has been proposed to design the questionnaire. A statistical analysis has been conducted to investigate whether the attributes, variables, and belief structure of the proposed model correlated with each other or not. After such analysis, the factors that influenced brokers' behavior have been identified as well as the strengths of their relationships. Such results are very helpful to support the planning of related parties in launching Internet trading.

How does online trading affect Western manufacturers' entry modes in China? This inductive study of 20 Western manufacturers and their Chinese intermediaries led to propositions exploring that question. Findings from the study indicate that online trading intensifies the information exchanges between Western manufacturers and their Chinese end users. Such information exchanges provide Western manufacturers with detailed market-specific knowledge. Moreover, online trading intensifies the competition between Western manufacturers as their customers can keep well-informed of their product qualities, new technologies, and prices. Online trading has great positive impacts on Western manufacturers' shift from low-control and low-risk entry modes to high-control and high-risk entry modes.

With the popular adoption of information technology (IT), business models and types of services in industries are strongly influenced. Consider the professional service industries such as accounting firms, services are the main business activities in their daily job. These firms are now facing the critical issue on how to apply IT effectively and improve their service quality. The purpose of this paper is to provide a demonstrative analysis for the evaluation of valuable activities in professional service firms via "Value Shop" model. And then find the strategic benefits of IT invested with corresponding value activities by the case study of accounting firms in Taiwan. The findings indicate that IT investment is indeed helpful for activities in daily business activities in such firms, whether it is strategy-centric, managerial, or operational activities.

Much advancement has taken place in E-commerce, especially in the area of e-procurement. This article describes some essential characteristics of e-procurement and its role in e-commerce and industry as a whole. We also discuss some of the newer developments in e-procurement and surmise the necessary modification of these developments for companies in Taiwan.

During the 1997 financial turmoil, the overall boom and slump was mainly due to the collapse of ill-informed speculation and a non-regulated stock market system. This collapse has probably created mistrust among the public and greatly impaired confidence in securities as an investment. From this painful experience, the government should control share prices and prevent extreme fluctuations by improving the transparency and efficiency in trading information transmission, market monitoring and document disclosure.

Therefore, online trading system, cross-market monitoring system and electronic filing system will be recommended in order to improve the low transparency and efficiency of financial information transmission. More importantly, all the information in these systems is inter-related for market monitoring or financial analysis. Thus, an integrated trading environment results in order to reduce redundancy work, error prone and information inefficiency.