Economic Crises in Southeast Asia, Chapter

Abstract

This paper explores episodes of financial crises and recessions experienced by the economies in Southeast Asia: the global debt crisis and the commodity price collapse in the 1980s, the Asian financial crisis in the 1990s, and the burst of the dot-com bubble and the global financial crisis in the 2000s. These crises highlight one common feature of the economies in Southeast Asia: due to its outward-oriented development strategy, these economies have become highly integrated and more exposed to the world economy, making them very vulnerable to events happening in the global economy. The severity of the crises however depended on how domestic governments responded to such external shocks.