Managing Economic Crisis: A Human Factors Approach

Managing economic crisis will require organisational and regional cooperation, based upon shared and mutually respectful understandings of the causes of, and solutions to, economic turbulence. In the wake of the 1997-98 Asian economic crisis, and following extensive collaboration between Thai and Australian behavioural scientists on the structure and content of an appropriate item pool, 252 citizens of Darwin, Australia's nearest urban neighbour, and 400 citizens of Bangkok, from the epicentre of the crisis, gave their views on the causes of economic crisis using a 39-item, three-factor Likert-style survey instrument. Confirmatory factor analysis was applied separately to each country data set, and in each case implied the presence of three latent variables (Jareskog GFI for Darwin and Bangkok respectively = 0.818 and 0.835). These latent variables comprised (1) economic misman agement/management; (2) government ineptitude/corruption (1 and 2 being closely inter related) ; and (3) a more distinctive, "human "factor, where economic crisis is attributed to purely behavioural factors such as lack of motivation, lack of discipline, and lack of social responsibility. Greater direct experience of economic crisis was consistently associated with more endorsement of all three factors, a finding that is broadly consistent with recent HD initiatives in Thailand and elsewhere in the region, towards greater inclusion, in development policy initiatives, for managing economic crisis, of the human factor (UNCTAD, 2000).