The Changing Politics of Finance in Korea and Thailand represents a 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. In the early 1980s, Korea and Thailand embarked on a process of financial liberalisation, against a backdrop of intensive external economic and political pressures. The two countries followed divergent approaches to financial market reform and achieved different results in the major areas of external and domestic liberalisation. Different as they were, market reform in Korea and Thailand did not bring about the promised benefits to their national economies. During the early and mid-1990s the decade-long liberalisation efforts produced critical macro-economic and structural problems that contributed to the onset of the financial crisis.
The main argument of this book is that liberalisation differences and reform policy failures had important endogenous sources. 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.