ABSTRACT
The Asian financial crisis of 1997 shattered the prosperity of many wealthy East Asian countries. Prior to the crisis, economic growth of the tiger economies of Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore had been particularly spectacular: GDP per capita rose in Hong Kong from around US$2,400 in 1965 to US$12,000 in the early 1990s while GDP per capita income in South Korea increased from about US$600 to more than US$5,000. This rapid rate of growth continued during the first half of the 1990s when average annual rates of GDP growth consistently exceeded 5% per annum, exceeding the growth records of the world's industrial nations such as Britain, Canada, Sweden and the United States (Tang, 2000a). For the tiger economies, low unemployment, rapid economic development and high inflation were the order of the day.
