This study examines how the health of the banks in ASEAN-3 countries namely Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand respond to the change in exchange rates and foreign interest rates in four large economies. The transmissions of the two external factors through domestic factors in each ASEAN-3 countries eventually affects Non-Performing Loan (NPL) of commercial banks. This study uses the monthly time series data and the renowned Structural Vector Autoregressive (VAR) model comprising five variables, namely exchange rate, foreign interest rate, domestic interest rate, money supply, and non-performing loan (NPL). The results indicate that there are different effects between ASEAN-3 countries, which can be classified as short-run effect and long-run effect. In the long run effect, external factors have a dominant role in determining NPL in ASEAN-3 countries. Yuan has the biggest effect on Malaysia’s NPL, while Indonesia is more affected by European interest rates rather than the fluctuation of the US currency and China’s interest rates. Among ASEAN-3 countries, Malaysia is the one that is the most vulnerable to external factors. While Thailand’s NPL is affected dominantly by domestic factors. This study shows that the Fed Funds Rate (US official interest rate) is not always the dominant factor affecting the health of domestic banks in ASEAN-3.

The Indonesian government launched a new people's business credit program as part of a package of economic policy and deregulation. The interest rate is set lower than the average of the current loan interest rates, especially when compared with rural bank interest rates. To capture the social spatial aspects, quota sampling is applied to ten areas that divided based on the social culture. Further, the method utilized in this research is logit models, which designed to analyse the determinants of asymmetric information particularly on the rural bank and small micro enterprises. The study was conducted in East Java as the province with the largest number of rural banks in Indonesia. Based on the estimation of asymmetric information model to the respondent of rural banks and small businesses, the result shows that adverse selection can be avoided by strengthening the information about prospective borrowers. Regarding moral hazard, rural banks and small businessmen argued that the imposition of the collateral to the debtor has an important role to avoid moral hazard. Rural bank respondents stated that the KUR program with low-interest rates has affected their business development. The results implied the need of broadening the collaboration schemes between this people’s business credit program and rural banks.