Summary and Conclusions

This book includes five studies on capital inflows, growth rates, exchanges rates and monetary policy, with the Introductory Chapter 1 and the Concluding Chapter 7 providing summaries of the contents of Chapters 2 to 6, incorporating the five studies and their findings. The five studies were all done on developing countries in East Asia. As pointed out in the introductory Chapter 1, the data used in each of these studies were deliberatively limited to periods preceding a severe economic crisis/recession. In the context of the four ASEAN-4 economies studied in Chapters 2 to 4, the crisis in question occurred in 1996–1997, so that our selected periods end before 1996. In the context of the Chinese economy examined in Chapters 5 and 6, the period studied ends prior to the world financial and economic crisis that started in the USA in 2007. This was done in the belief that the crisis/recession periods represent several shifts in the relationships being investigated, with these shifts being peculiar to the crisis period and not otherwise applicable to the economies being studied. In any case, the exact nature of these shifts is not a priori known and, while there do exist some econometric techniques for estimating some types of shifts, they may not capture the shift or shifts that actually occurred. Consequently, the data used were confined to periods before the relevant crisis/recession…