Youngwon Cho
Youngwon Cho is Associate Professor of Department of Political Science at St. Francis Xavier University. He studied International Business and Political Science at Carleton University for his undergraduate program, and subsequently received his MA and PhD in Political Studies from Queen’s University. His general research and teaching areas are in the field of International Relations, specializing in the subfield of International Political Economy with a regional focus on East Asia. Prior to joining StFX in 2008, he taught at Queen’s, McMaster, and Trent. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Asiatic Research Institute at Korea University in Seoul.
Youngwon’s primary research interests revolve around a set of interrelated issues that fall under the broader umbrella of the international political economy of money and finance, with a focus on emerging market economies (EMEs) in general and East Asian countries in particular. His past publications and ongoing research have examined the political economy of the global reserve system, foreign exchange policies in EMEs, sovereign wealth funds, and institutionalized monetary cooperation in East Asia. He has also worked and published on the regional security complex in East Asia, specifically on the ongoing nuclear crisis in the Korean Peninsula, for which he won the 2015 SAGE Prize in International Scholarship.
Specialization: International relations; international political economy; politics of money and finance; financial globalization and emerging markets; East Asian regionalism; regional security complex in East Asia.
Youngwon is currently pursuing two main research projects: 1) regional economic surveillance in East Asia; and 2) capital account policies and financial vulnerability in South Korea. Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, his project on East Asia’s regional surveillance mechanism examines the institutional design, capabilities, and autonomy of the ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office. His second project, funded by the Academy of Korean Studies, is part of a larger monograph project examining various policy responses of South Korea to the challenges of financial globalization, tentatively titled, Coping with Global Finance: South Korea’s Policy Responses to Financial Globalization.
Cho, Youngwon. “When $262 Billion Is Not Enough: Rethinking South Korea’s Reserve Accumulation.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 46, no. 1 (2016): 95-119.
Cho, Youngwon. “Making the Poor Pay for the Rich: Capital Account Liberalization in the Developing World and the Global Reserve System.” Globalizations 11, no. 6 (2014): 809-25.
Cho, Youngwon. “South Korea and the Pitfalls of East Asian Monetary Regionalism: Do Neighbors Mean Neighborly Behavior?” Pacific Focus 29, no. 1 (2014): 92-115.
Cho, Youngwon. “Method to the Madness of Chairman Kim: The Instrumental Rationality of North Korea’s Pursuit of Nuclear Weapons.” International Journal 69, no. 1 (2014): 5-25. Winner of the SAGE Prize in International Scholarship for best article on international affairs.
Cho, Youngwon. “Taking Stock of Monetary Regionalism in East Asia: A Glass Half-Full or Half-Empty?” Journal of East Asian Affairs 27, no. 2 (2013): 55-88.
