Financing investment in East Asia: Regional or global savings?

This paper investigates the extent to which domestic investment in East Asian countries is financed by domestic, (East Asian) regional and global savings in order to infer the relative importance of regional vs. global capital markets in East Asia. Panel regression results show that regional saving in East Asia plays a much more important role than global saving in financing investment in the region. The results suggest that global capital flows, despite its huge volume in East Asia, does not contribute to proper investment financing. The results also show that Japanese saving has significant effects on regional investment but Chinese saving does not.