The Changing Politics Of Finance In Korea And Thailand

This is the first systematic attempt to explore the causal relationship between financial market reform and financial crisis in an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective. It examines the political underpinnings of financial policy-change and provides an in-depth analysis of market liberalisation processes and their impact on the economic turmoil of 1997-98 in Korea and Thailand. The common crisis stemmed from divergent reform patterns and originated from dissimilar institutional deficiencies and political constraints. The book will be essential reading for both policy-makers and academics concerned with national governance in an era of globalisation.

This is the first systematic attempt to explore the causal relationship between financial market reform and financial crisis in an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective. It examines the political underpinnings of financial policy-change and provides an in-depth analysis of market liberalisation processes and their impact on the economic turmoil of 1997-98 in Korea and Thailand. The common crisis stemmed from divergent reform patterns and originated from dissimilar institutional deficiencies and political constraints. The book will be essential reading for both policy-makers and academics concerned with national governance in an era of globalisation.

In light of the Asian financial crisis of 1997, Lai examines whether East Asian economies converged onto the liberal market model by studying the evolution of the financial sectors of Korea, Malaysia and Thailand. This includes sectoral diversification, the nature of competition, and the regulatory and supervisory frameworks.

A team of international leading experts provide a much needed re-examination of the theoretical claims and the empirical foundation of developmental state theory. Asian States argues that regardless of the merits of the developmental state as an explanation of economic growth, it falls far short of being an adequate theory of the state in Asia. The contributors critically review claims about agency, state-society and state-market relations that shape developmental projects. It broadens the analysis of state involvement in developmental projects and considers the variety of political and social bases for state projects across East and Southeast Asia in a theoretically sensitive, thematic and empirically rich way.

Persistent episodes of global financial crises have placed the existing system of international monetary and financial governance under stress. The resulting economic turmoil provides a focal point for rethinking the norms and institutions of global financial architecture and the policy options of public and private authorities at national, regional and transnational levels. This volume moves beyond analysis of the causes and consequences of recent financial crises and concentrates on issues of policy. Written by distinguished scholars, it focuses on the tension between global market structures and national policy imperatives. Accessible to both specialists and general readers, the analysis is coherent across a broad range of theoretical and empirical cases. Offering a series of reasoned policy responses to financial integration and crises, the volume grapples directly with the institutional and often-neglected normative dimensions of international financial architecture. The volume thus constitutes required reading for scholars and policy-makers.

When are policy makers willing to make costly adjustments to their macroeconomic policies to mitigate balance-of-payments problems? Which types of adjustment strategies do they choose? Under what circumstances do they delay reform, and when are such delays likely to result in financial crises? To answer these questions, this book examines how macroeconomic policy adjustments affect individual voters in financially open economies and argues that the anticipation of these distributional effects influences policy makers' decisions about the timing and the type of reform. Empirically, the book combines analyses of cross-national survey data of voters' and firms' policy evaluations with comparative case studies of national policy responses to the Asian financial crisis of 1997/8 and the recent global financial crisis in Eastern Europe. The book shows that variation in policy makers' willingness to implement reform can be traced back to differences in the vulnerability profiles of their countries' electorates.