ABSTRACT
Following three decades of exceptional economic growth, most Asian nations suffered a severe financial and economic crisis in 1997–1998. A large body of literature has been dedicated to understand the causes of this new type of crisis (cf. Cartapanis et al., 2002; IMF, 2000; World Bank, 1998), and it appears that “a combination of macro-economic imbalances, external developments, and weakness in financial and corporate systems” (IMF, 2000) is responsible for the severity of the Asian crisis. Although the economic recovery in the region has been relatively strong in aggregate terms, it has also varied on an individual country basis and depending on the topical indicators.
