Subsequent to the initial devaluations of Asian currencies, the response from Asia in terms of deeds rather than mere words, and externally from multilateral agencies and western governments and institutions came in various stages. We shall look at these various stages in great detail, up until and including present day Asia and current strategies being adopted to try and secure economic recovery in Asia, but first it is important to list the individual stages themselves:
1. Undoubtedly, the first stage reflected no doubt galling capitulation, the humiliation of having to go cap in hand to the IMF and other multilateral financial organisations for financial and economic aid. First, Thailand, then Indonesia and finally Korea went down this route. Armed with its standard approaches to systemic crises, the IMF arranged massive bailout packages for these three countries concerned, but attached severe criteria and conditions, necessitating that a clear programme of macro- and microeconomic measures needed to be strictly followed for regular loan disbursement to ensue. To summarise, these criteria reflected an emphasis on tight fiscal and monetary discipline to reduce economic overheating, crush imported inflation, close external imbalances and last but not least to stabilise the currency which up until then had been in free-fall.
Thailand accepted this bitter medicine with grim resignation. Indonesia initially agreed to it, then sought to restructure that agreement and finally accepted a more palatable accord, more for reasons ol face than anything else since the core elements of the agreement remained. As for Korea, it needed extra help in the form of a debt restructuring agreement by the international banks in order to stop the slide.
2. Yet the initial IMF rescue plan was far from the parachute which it professed to be - the ‘chute did open briefly but only for it to “Roman candle, the hapless victim left to plummet to earth with a sickening thud. In financial market terms, the announcement of the IMF bailout programmes did nothing to stop the slide in the Thai baht, the Indonesian rupiah or the Korean won. Indeed, that selling pressure intensified, climaxing in late December of 1997 and early January of 1998 only when most of the capital that could leave those currencies had finally managed to do so. This second wave of the Asian currency crisis despite international rescue efforts - or as some perceived, because of the nature of those efforts and the attached conditions - caused the IMF to come under significant criticism, not only from within Asia, but also from western private sector economists and finally from none other than the chief economist of the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, hence resulting in a rather embarrassing and damaging public feud between the two agencies while Asia ‘burned”. Whatever the merits or criticism, to give the IMF credit, it changed tack in 1998, allowing its programme member countries substantially more fiscal and monetary policy leeway than had first been envisaged in order to try and boost growth. Together with the resulting policy loosening by Asian financial authorities, this marks the second stage of the response to the crisis.
3. The third stage concerned those countries which did not put themselves under the IMF loan programme, either because they did not need financial aid or because they refused to accept such indignity. The po1ic responses from these countries varied to some extent though the can largely be grouped into those which applied IMF-tpe policy responses despite not being under the IMF programme, those which sought more specific responses to their own economic needs, and finally the exception to the rule, Malaysia, which changed the rules, doing the unthinkable by imposing capital and exchange controls. Aside from the case of Malaysia, two further cases deserve special mention: Singapore and Hong Kong, the first for superb economic management at a time of extreme financial and economic strain, the second for defeating speculative forces where all others had failed and baring the pain.
4. The fourth stage examines the attempts by the various Asian countries to limit the damage at the micro-economic level and seek to deal with what microeconomic infrastructure there was left standing in the s ake of the crisis. These attempts varied from the vigorous in the case of Korea to the resigned in the case of Indonesia. Not surprisingly, regionwide, these attempts have met with varying degrees of success. Such is the scale of the damage that it will take years in some cases (notably
5. Finally, the fifth and last stage looks at the policies put in place by Asian authorities in 1999 in an attempt to initiate and then to secure economic recovery. Ahead of finalising or developing sufficient microeconomic reform, the emphasis has been on creating a sound macroeconomic platform for economic stabilisation and recovery. The good news, as we shall see in Chapter 3 is that this appears to have been largely successful. The bad news is that inadequate reform and restructuring at the microeconomic level could stall that recovery unless such reforms are accelerated and deepened.
ไม่มีความคิดเห็น:
แสดงความคิดเห็น