The appointment of Monetary Board member Eli Remolona as the next Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Governor in place of Felipe Medalla drew positive reaction, given the former’s vast international experience on central banking.
Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. chief economist Michael Ricafort said this is a “welcome development for the markets and economy.”
“Given his international experience/track record/reputation on central banking in developed countries, [it] would infuse a more international perspective on central banking as well as the adoption of more global best practices on central banking,” Ricafort said.
He said Remolona’s vast experience would be very useful in terms of fulfilling price stability, financial stability and regulatory mandates, all of which would help sustain the country’s long-term economic growth and development.
Ricafort said the most important priorities of the next BSP Governor are the stability of prices and the peso-dollar exchange rate.
Remolona is a member of the BSP’s Monetary Board. Before joining the BSP, he served as an independent director of the Bank of the Philippine Islands and chair of its risk management committee. He was a professor of Finance and director of Central Banking at the Asia School of Business in Kuala Lumpur, a collaboration with the MIT Sloan School of Management.
He served as BIS regional head for Asia and the Pacific from 2008 to 2018 and worked closely with governors of the 12 leading central banks in the region to formulate policy on such issues as financial regulatory reform, capital market development, and financial stability, while also overseeing BIS reserve management for Asia-Pacific central banks.
As the newly appointed editor of the BIS Quarterly Review in 2000, he overhauled the journal and turned it into a highly-ranked scholarly flagship publication of the BIS.
He has also published widely in leading journals in economics and finance, with papers that have attracted over 5,450 citations. Since 2005, he has been an associate editor for Finance of the International Journal of Central Banking.
In 1991, he joined Paul Krugman (awarded the Nobel Prize in 2013) and Susan Collins (now president of the Boston Fed) in a high-level economic mission to the Philippines to advise the Philippine government on structural reforms.
He has taught at Williams College, Columbia University, New York University and the School of Economics of the University of the Philippines. He has given seminars at the Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, Bank of England, Bank of Japan, International Monetary Fund, Asian Development Bank, World Bank and many other central banks and academic institutions.
He received a Ph.D. in Economics “with distinction” from Stanford University in 1982. In 1972, he received a Bachelor’s degree in Economics with honors from the Ateneo de Manila University.