동아시아의 경제위기와 역내 국제경제협력

The paper looks at the East Asian experiences of currency-financial-economic crisis between 1997 and 1998. We start with a review of the broad spectrum of causes of the East Asian crisis so far discussed in the literature. And we argue that the proximate causes of the crisis should be found in the problem of national regulatory policy inadequacy for the financial sector of the East Asian countries given the increasingly footloose international flow of financial capital, rather than attributing the crisis to the long-standing problems of the East Asian economies. The appropriateness of policy responses of national governments and the policy intervention of the International Monetary Fund under the IMF conditionality are discussed in Section 3, although the discussion is mostly limited to the case of Korea. We focus on the criticisms raised on the ineptness of policy prescriptions imposed on those countries in exchange for the emergency credit facility by IMF. In Section 4, we move on to the question of long-term prospect for the East Asia economic growth by putting the East Asian problem as one of creating and continuously adapting its social institution to the evolving global economic system. In the final section we get a glimpse on recent trade data among East Asian countries to argue that East Asia is different from what it used to be in 1980s, but there is a long way to go before it is like North America and Europe. In the meantime, an informal framework for regional economic cooperation such as the 'ASEAN plus three' can be more useful where concrete international policy cooperation measures can be discussed than hurrying to build an overarching formal framework for regional economic cooperation.