Lee Jae-young, head of Finance Ministry’s foreign exchange market division, has been tapped for second-in-command position at the ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office, a Singapore-based financial surveillance apparatus for Asian countries, the ministry said Sunday.

Lee is to become a senior economist at AMRO, whose job is to run a multi-billion-dollar currency swap scheme in the region set aside to ward off future financial crises. Its main functions include monitoring economic developments in the region and making decisions to channel a reserve fund to member nations in credit crunch.

Often dubbed the Asian version of the International Monetary Fund, AMRO was established in 2009 to manage the region’s safety net mechanism, the $120 billion Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization currency swap facility.

Lee will head a team of economists from member nations of ASEAN+3 for the next three years to oversee fiscal standings of Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia and Laos.

“I’m tasked to monitor economic conditions of assigned countries, as surveillance team of IMF does, and will make policy recommendations accordingly,” Lee said.

Lee has Ph.D. in economics from U.C. Irvine and an undergraduate degree in economics from Seoul National University.

The ASEAN Plus Three nations include Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Brunei Darussalam and the plus-three nations ― Japan, China, and Korea.

By Cynthia J. Kim (cynthiak@heraldcorp.com)