ABSTRACT
The economic crisis of the Asian region that began in the middle of 1997 heralded the apparent end of a period of rapid economic growth and was expected to alter, even reverse, migration patterns that had emerged during the fi rst half of the 1990s: migration patterns that were increasingly focused on destinations within Asia itself. While it is common to speak of an ‘Asian crisis’ it is important to keep in mind that the crisis was centred in East and Southeast Asia, with relatively few repercussions in the countries of South or Central Asia. In the epicentre of the crisis, the World Bank’s East Asian ‘miracle economies’ of Japan, three of the four ‘tigers’, Hong Kong, South Korea and Singapore, together with the economies of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, which had grown at perhaps the highest and most sustained rates of economic growth in history, appeared to go into economic freefall. Between 1960 and 1985, these economies demonstrated a growth in GNP per capita of 5.5 per cent per annum, with double-digit growth not uncommon for particular countries for particular years. In 1998, all of the East and Southeast Asian economies, with the notable exceptions of China and Taiwan, entered into recession or negligible growth (Table 3.1). The recession was deepest in Indonesia and Thailand. Regional currencies depreciated signifi cantly, in the case of the Indonesian ringgit by over 60 per cent in 1998 alone. Regional stock markets plunged, and banks and fi nancial institutions failed on an unprecedented scale in South Korea and Thailand.
