ABSTRACT
For the five countries most heavily affected by the Asian financial crisis – Thailand, Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia – the toll in both economic and human terms was enormous: in 1998, these countries saw their economies shrink by an average of 7.7 percent and many millions of people lost their jobs.1 The magnitude of the crisis, and the contagion effects in Latin America and Russia, sounded alarm bells about the substantial risks and potential fragility of the international financial architecture. A voluminous literature has been written on the crisis as a result – what caused it, how it was handled by governments and international organizations, and the lessons learned or not learned. So in crafting an edited volume on this topic, there is legitimate concern with simply restating what has already been said. What makes this volume different is the unique combination of people directly involved with managing the crisis alongside leading academic specialists. By combining the perspectives of academics with practitioners, this volume complements other recent reflections on the crisis, including the recent series of scholar/practitioner papers in Oxford’s Pathways through Financial Crises project (Woods, 2006) the special issues of Asian Economic Policy Review (Ito et al., 2007) and Asian Survey (2007), as well as the scholarly collection in MacIntyre et al. (2008), to name just a few.
