ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION Ever since the early 1970s countries in Asia and Latin America, and to a lesser extent in Africa, have moved from inward-looking policies with heavy government involvement in the economy to more outward-looking policies that primarily rely on the price mechanism rather than on detailed government directives, protection and subsidies. The road to a more or less free market economy has not always been smooth. The most radical attempt at liberalisation, the Chilean experiment in the late 1970s, to all appearances foundered in 1982 and it took the Chileans several years to get their liberalisation process on course again. The Indonesian approach by contrast has been much more cautious and so far major crises have been avoided (though in all fairness it should be noted that Indonesia only seriously started her liberalisation process after the 1982 worldwide debt crisis and in addition had very little dollardenominated debt).
