Background
China’s successful coping with the effects of the financial crisis has not only shown itstremendous capacity to generate and sustain growth, but also underlined the importance ofstrengthened regional cooperation in East Asia. Ever since the Asian crisis of 1997-98, East Asian countries have been committed to improving regional financial architecture. China actively joined these efforts as part of the ASEAN plus 3 regional integration efforts. China’s external financial policy now keeps a strong regional focus and is actively engaged in multi-lateralising the Chiang Mai Initiative for financial cooperation.

At the same time, China’s external financial policy is also very engaged in global issues. Chinais actively involved in international cooperation efforts to create comprehensive and efficient financial market regulation and supervision. The G20 has agreed on an agenda for better regulation of financial markets and on a framework for balanced and sustainable growth, and has recently added the support of the IMF and the Financial Stability Board. Throughout the world efforts are being made to enhance sound financial regulation, however, thus far these efforts have not resulted in a set of unified standards that all countries have agreed to adhere to.

In May 2010 Europe had to overcome unprecedented challenges to its monetary integration in the Euro area. The European regional integration process that has hitherto served as a point of reference for regional integration efforts in other parts of the world reaffirmed its fundamental strength. Nevertheless, a number of policy challenges--such as the need among EU members for better coordination of national financial and economic policies--remain. With regard to the strengthening of supervision and regulation of the European financial sector, political initiatives were started during the last year, but remain to be expanded and implemented.

Against the backdrop of the uneven recovery from the global financial and economic crisis in China and Europe, this workshop seeks to discuss the ongoing initiatives for the reform of financial regulatory frameworks, as one of the key issues to hedge against future financial crises and to exchange experiences with financial and regulatory cooperation in East Asia and in Europe. The challenges to comprehensive regional financial integration efforts are to be debated against within the context of recent events in Europe and East Asia.

Conference Concept
This dialogue will provide a platform for peer-to-peer discussion between participants from China and Germany, as well as from Asian and European regional bodies and international organisations. The CUFE-InWEnt-DIE-dialogue will place particular emphasis on an exchange between practitioners from financial sector organisations and academics to assess public policy issues related to regional financial integration and global regulation against the findings of scientific research. Running since 2008, this dialogue is part of a series of conferences, with partners from China, India, South Africa and Mexico. The focus of the conferences is to consider country and region specific challenges of the financial sector as a starting point to debate the potential of regional financial and economic integration to counter challenges of financial stability and to promote growth. Participation will be highly selective to allow for an intensive debate and to offer quality networking opportunities. The conference will be preceded by a series of lectures given to the faculty and advanced junior researchers of CUFE to give them a chance to acquaint themselves with the current European thinking and to offer them an opportunity to feed their ideas into the debate.