wice 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 macro-economic understanding. The problem stems from three differing, yet interrelated facets. There is the corporate level, the financial level, and the international level. After this, there is the study of the macro-economic facets of the Asian government's economic policies. Causes leading up to the crash.Corporate level-At the corporate level in the individual Asian economies, we see that the individual governments highly pushed economic growth. They adopted policies that would result in growth (such as incentives on loans for larger corporations). One of the problems is that the emphasis on growth was so strong that the public sectors were insuring and guaranteeing loans, investments, an...
