Conclusion: Lost in translation: reinterpreting the rise of the corporate order in Southeast Asia

This book is concerned with the growth of large corporations in Southeast Asia, focusing on corporate organization, methods of financing, business environment and corporate governance. It seeks to understand their role in the dynamic growth of that region and those same factors that unleashed the crisis in 1997. The usefulness of such a study of large corporations is that it will assist in unravelling this rise and collapse within three decades. Although Radelet and Sachs attributed the crisis to volatile international financial markets, irrational speculation and contagion, this volume subscribes to the Krugman hypothesis of endogenous structural defects escalating into crisis.1