Asian Financial Crisis and its Impact on Taiwan Economy
Presenter: Dr. Jain-Shing Chen
Executive Director - Asia Pacific Region, Taylor Nelson Sofres Telecoms
摘要：
It has been more than two years since the financial crisis broke out in Thailand and spread to other countries in the Asian region by the end of 1997. Today the crisis is almost over, but the economic impacts on several Asian countries were more severe than many thought in the beginning. Is severity has caused global concerns. This crisis also generated many research on the causes of the Asian financial turmoil and its impacts on the region, politically, economically and socially. A partial list of these studies include Corseti, Pesenti and Roubini (1998a and 1998b), Dornbusch (1998), Fischer (1998), Krugman (1998), Park and Song (1998), and Radelet and Sachs (1998a and 1998b).
What are the main causes of the crisis in the Asian region? Obviously there are many factors that could contribute as causes of this crisis, but economists around the world cannot agree which one factor is the key player in causing this financial crisis. Nevertheless, many research studies on the causes of the financial crisis, both theoretical and empirical, can be summarized into three broad explanations, and they are:
- Mismanagement of fiscal and monetary policies in the Asian countries;
- Growing weakness in the fundamentals in the Asian economies; and
- Instability intrinsic in the actions of international capital markets.
For example, Radelet and Sachs (1998b) argue that the structural deficiencies of the international capital market were primarily responsible for the depth, severity, and the simultaneous nature of the crisis in the region. In contrast, Fischer (1998) argue that Asian financial difficulties result primarily from inadequate financial sector supervision, and poor assessment and management of financial risks. There is sufficient room between these arguments for a fresh look at which factors offer the most convincing case for causing the crisis. In this paper, we utilize a profit econometric analysis with country-specific pooled data to examine empirically the cause of this financial crisis in the Asian region, and also its impact on Taiwan economy.