Causes and consequences of the Asian financial crisis, G.W Noble and J. Ravenhill.

Résumé du document

This article proposes an analysis of the deep crisis that struck East Asia in the 1990s. The authors give us in the most synthetic way, a panorama of the different analyses made about the crisis and their own ones. In 1997, the crisis came as a shock for the Asian countries as well as for the rest of the world. This crisis was unexpected for at least two main reasons. Firstly, because the whole world deeply believed in the virtue of economic liberalism. Secondly, because, triggered by the Japanese success, most countries of East Asia had got strong export sectors and a certain macro-economic stability.

Extraits

[...] A part called liberalization within a Flawed Policy framework shows the error of economical strategies that lead to the withdrawal of the American investments. In the following part called: The politics of Financial Policy: Behind the fundamentals they go further and demonstrate not only that some mistakes have been made, but more broadly that the whole economic policies are incoherent, they even use the word “awkward” or “unwise”. They justify this kind of accusation by the fact that once the crisis set in motion the government kept on following the wrong way. [...]

[...] In a last part they try to go further than the mere explanation of the mechanism of the crisis and of its very origins: they show the thrust of such a financial crisis. Even if they mention it- the great powers such as the United States or Europe are at the time strong enough to remain intact from the Asian crisis, the latter has all the same affected the financial system at world-wide scale. Indeed, the incapacity of the IMF and the World Bank to tackle the crisis harshly challenged their competencies. Globally the authors' argumentation is quite organized insofar as they enlarge gradually their field of analysis. [...]

[...] To finish the authors underline the inefficiency of the regional organizations, namely the ASEAN and the APEC, into curbing the crisis effects. The Authors' argumentation. The purpose of the authors is here to provide us the clearest and the most exhaustive description as well as explanation of the Asian crisis. In his first part they merely describe us the whole mechanism of the crisis, from the first upheaval (the decline of Thailand's exportations) to the official declaration of a generalized crisis. In a second part he tries to trace the very origin of the crisis. [...]

[...] When the authors assume that the main lesson the Asian countries can draw from the crisis is to keep a consequent reserve of foreign currencies, they ground their assumption on the punctual situation. However as I said, each crisis has its particularity, and is the result of a certain conjunction of factors, therefore, a solution is not still valuable, the best example of this is the Keynesian answer that permitted to cope with the crisis of 1929 but, when set in 1970, it did not help the occident to get out of it, to say the least. [...]

[...] It would mean that if the Asian did not manage to deal with their crisis, it was because they were under-qualified respectively to the Occident. In other words, Occident would have managed to curb the crisis. Yet, we guess that it is not that simple, indeed, the occidental governments did also take the bad measures to curb the crisis in the seventies, and it was not because of a lack of competence but just because each economic problem meets its own logic. [...]