The Effects of Financial Crises on Developing Countries

In ten years, emerging countries have moved from net borrowers to net lenders. At the root of the 1997-98 financial crisis, they became collateral victims of the 2007-08 crisis that erupted in the United States and Europe, after having withstood relatively well at first. This article proposes an analysis of the repositioning of emerging countries in the global financial sphere on two levels. This concerns, on the one hand, institutional representativeness vis-à-vis the industrialized countries, the IMF and, on the other hand, the role of emerging countries in the context of a contagious financial crisis. In this sense, the article raises the question of the coupling or the decoupling of the economic cycles of the emerging countries with those of the industrialized countries, in an environment of financial interconnection. Indeed, this 2008 crisis will appear as a shock common to emerging countries from a financial point of view, while the Asian crises of 1997-98 were not triggered by common shocks. But the economic decoupling hypothesis has yet to be verified: everything will depend on the depth of the US recession and the continued strength of domestic demand in emerging economies.