ABSTRACT
Loosely translated from the Thai, the latter quotation provides as good a starting point as any for a book on multinational corporations in Southeast Asia. This is not to suggest that there are no clearly discernible and emerging trends. But it certainly summarizes events of the past decade, during which the bubbling optimism of the mid-1990s quite without precedent gave way to the long, gloom-laden months of 1998, when most of the region was caught in the iron grip of economic and financial collapse. As the precursor of the region-wide downturn and subsequent contraction, Thailand provides the starkest example of this change. Just a few short years ago Thailand was viewed by the world’s foremost financial institutions as an emerging tiger, with one of the highest economic growth rates ever witnessed. In early 1995 The Economist projected Thailand to be the world’s eighth largest economy in 2020, and a year later the country’s economic planners took the almost unbelievable step of actually writing 8 percent growth into the next five-year plan (Keeratipipatpong, 1998; Phongpaichit and Baker, 1998). To most observers it seemed the Asian miracle would go on indefinitely.
