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The 1997 and 1998 Asian Economic Crisis Essay

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The 1997 and 1998 Asian Economic Crisis

The purpose of this paper is to explore the causes of the 1997 and 1998 Asian economic crisis; and to research the effects of the crisis in each of the following categories:
1. The effects of the crisis in the countries involved in the economic crisis of 1997-98.
2. The effects on the governments affected by the crash, and
3. The effects that the Asian crisis has had on the differing world markets as well as the effects that it will continue to have (if any) on the world markets in the near future.
We will also present our analysis of the causes and our predictions as to what the future will be for the countries involved.

The paper will first look at the causes behind the crash. We can …show more content…

Since 1960 the region's top performers---Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand---grew more than twice as fast as the rest of East Asia, three times as fast as Latin America and South Asia, and five times faster than sub-Saharan Africa. Average real income per person quadrupled in the five Northeast Asian countries and doubled among the three Southeast Asians. So why is it that after such incredible performances for such a sustained period of time that the model all of a sudden collapsed? Was it the fault of exchange rate speculators, as some seem to say? Or was the real root of the problem actually embedded in faulty macro-economic policies adopted by the governments of the Asian economies? Some (such as the president of Malaysia, Dr. Mahathir) seem to think that the crash was the result of speculators devaluating the currencies of the Asian nations as a result of a general panic in the market. He says that "morons" like Mr. Soros (a very wealthy U.S. speculator) played with the markets, took advantage of them, and devaluated the exchange rates of certain nation's currency at the expense of the individual nations. However, the evidence strongly supports that the real problems came not from speculators, but rather from faulty economic policies adopted by governments. In many such cases, the governmental policies seem to be absolutely devoid of

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