This paper re-examines Athukorala and Warr's ex post investigation of several Asian countries' vulnerability to balance of payments crises. It argues that their focus on 'mobile capital' is flawed in two important aspects. It also questions their ideas about exchange rate 'overvaluation', and argues that their case that this is a meaningful indicator of vulnerability is unconvincing. The finding that rapid finance sector growth seems to have been a precursor to crisis is followed up with a discussion of the policy implications, which was largely absent from the original article. The paper goes on to question the logic of the authors' finding that the crises were not caused by irrational private sector behaviour. Finally, it suggests that government policy often implicitly assumes the prevalence of such behaviour, and that vulnerability to crises results from policy that prevents continuous adjustment of the real exchange rate to changing circumstances.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Australian National University, Economics RSPAS in its series Departmental Working Papers with number
2003-11.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: