Welcome to the Annual Meetings of the IMF/World Bank Group, and in particular, to this BOJ/CEMLA seminar on regional financial cooperation, which is one of the most relevant and pressing issues in our increasingly inter-connected world.
Today, in my remarks, I would first like to touch upon the history of cooperation among central banks in Asia, followed by an assessment of what has been achieved since the Asian Currency Crisis of the late 1990s, and how this helped Asia weather the shocks of the current global financial crisis.