IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-0-333-97801-6_4.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Thailand: The Asian Financial Crisis and Social Changes

In: The Social Impact of the Asia Crisis

Author

Listed:
  • Sauwalak Kittiprapas

Abstract

In Thailand, the 1997 financial crisis has resulted in adverse impacts on economic and social systems more seriously than anyone could anticipate. This crisis originated from problems in many sectors: finance, real production, government and management. Since financial liberalization of the early 1990s,1 foreign capital has been attracted to the country by high profit margins in stocks, high interest rates, and a relatively lower risk in Southeast Asia, due to the US dollar-pegged currency (Lauridsen 1998). With cheaper interest rates for off-shore loans and a perceived fixed exchange rate, the Thai private sector continued to borrow. This increased the burden of foreign debt. Without effective management and supervision, the increasing capital inflows mostly came in the form of short-term loans and went into speculative (such as real estate and stock market) rather than productive sectors. Excessive private investment, particularly in risky and non-tradable sectors, and property price inflation soon led to a bubble economy. The increased overconsumption and the high investment–savings gap in the economy caused the balance-of-payment deficit to blow out.

Suggested Citation

  • Sauwalak Kittiprapas, 2000. "Thailand: The Asian Financial Crisis and Social Changes," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Tran Hoa (ed.), The Social Impact of the Asia Crisis, chapter 4, pages 35-56, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-333-97801-6_4
    DOI: 10.1057/9780333978016_4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-333-97801-6_4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.