Financial Crisis and East Asian Development Model Kyung Tae Lee (KIEP) After Asia was struck by a series of foreign currency crises, government officials, academia and international organizations from the West at once spurned their past positive evaluation of Asia s economic development and denounced the Asian development model. International financial organizations including the IMF and the majority of western economists argued that the root cause of the East Asian currency crises was not temporary shortage of liquidity but fundamental defects in the East Asian economic structure. They also emphasized that the systemic defects were created when market principles failed to operate properly due to excessive intervention and regulation by the Asian governments. Limits of Neoclassical Criticism on East Asia and Potential Danger The Neoclassical or orthodox school had in the past made generous assessment on Asia s market-friendly economic development strategy but ever since the currency crises present contrasting evaluation. This contrasting evaluation before and after the crises, however, is logically inconsistent. For Neoclassical school, the market mechanism was the only mechanism assuring ultimate economic efficiency and government intervention would bring about market failure and diminish economic efficiency. However, they failed to understand how or provide an explanation for the fact that both intense government involvement and high economic growth occurred at the same time in Korea, Japan and ASEAN countries. The contradicting arguments before and after the crises by the Neoclassical economists come from their contradicting evaluation of economic fundamentals of the East Asian countries. Why do the Neoclassical single out systemic defects of the East Asian countries as the primary cause of currency crises even though they might have lost the consistency in their line of argument? For that, there are two possible explanations that are, however, logically inconsistent and counterfactual. First, this can be interpreted as an admission by the Neoclassical that their previous evaluation of the East Asian Miracle was erroneous. That is, the East Asian economy was already vulnerable well before the crises, so it was a matter of time for those crises to occur in the region. Nevertheless, the Neoclassical in this case have an additional task of finding a new variable that would better explain the East Asian Miracle. The answer
for this task lies in acknowledging the effectiveness of government intervention. However, the possibility for such acknowledgment is quite low, since it runs counter to the liberalist perspective on economy by the Neoclassical school. The second assumption is siding with Paul Krugman, in saying that the East Asian Miracle is a one-time phenomenon that is not sustainable. Yet this fails to explain why the East Asian countries are recovering from the currency crises much sooner than the world had expected. Krugman and other Neoclassical economists may insist that the East Asian countries are abandoning the past government-led system and adopting a new market-led system. However, it is not convincing that such dramatic economic system turnover consumes only a couple of years to complete. The lack of logical consistency by the Neoclassical before and after the currency crises needs another persuasive explanation in order not to invite any suspicion that the national interests of specific countries were saved at the expense of the East Asian countries. East Asian Development Model and Structural Vulnerability Various opinions regarding the causes of East Asian currency crises can be summed to the external shock theory and the internal factor theory. The external shock theory pinpoints international speculative capital and herd behavior of creditors as the causes, but it falls short of clearly explaining why the crisis originating in Thailand hit Korea but missed Singapore or Taiwan. The argument that most harshly reprehends the East Asian countries out of all internal factor arguments is this: The East Asian development model inevitably conceived structural vulnerability high debt ratio, inadequate corporate governance, adherent relationship between political and corporate circles, too big to fail myth and moral hazard and this structural vulnerability incited the currency crises. This is the so-called original sin hypothesis. Defining the core characteristics of the East Asian model would help close examination of the validity of the original sin hypothesis. Largely those characteristics are macroeconomic and microeconomic. Macroeconomic characteristics include high savings and investment, high level of education, diligent work attitude and exportoriented economic policy. As macroeconomic characteristics of the East Asian model tell, the role of the government in economic growth was limited; the government showed no outstanding characteristic but being faithful to the basic principles of market economy.
One of the microeconomic characteristics of the East Asian model is the unique form of relationship between the government and the corporate sector. In other words, East Asian governments did not act as bystanders toward the market, as their Anglo-Saxon counterparts did, nor central planners, as their socialist counterparts did, but had taken a third way. In the East Asian model, the government accommodated the market in terms of function and ran counter to the market in terms of system. The East Asian countries actively fulfilled the resource mobilization function, mediating and supporting function to overcome market failure in the early stage of economic development. Furthermore, sound macroeconomic management and export-oriented policy enabled efficient resource allocation and, even in case of direct government involvement in resource allocation, discouraged serious distortion of resource allocation. All in all, the result is not too alien from what it would have looked like with a mature market; therefore, the government intervention was market-accommodating in terms of function. Nonetheless, East Asian governments needed to systemically acquire authority to control the market in order to effectively carry out such functions. In the area of financial policy, they weakened the authority of the central bank and commercial banks to match currency supply, interest rate and financial fund allocation to the goals they had set. In the area of foreign exchange policy, they induced concentration of scarce foreign reserves on strategic industries through strict foreign exchange control and maintained exchange rates favorable to export. East Asian governments also intervened in market competition system. Placing substantial weight on the effect of economies of scale, they repressed new market entries, regulated import in the name of protective fostering of national industry and restrained inter-firm mergers. Such market system acted for market repression rather than for market development; the government decided who should enter the market and after entry protected entrants from competition both at home and abroad, as well as deciding who should exit the market. Structural Vulnerability and Currency Crises Structural vulnerability of the crisis-afflicted East Asian countries is, rather than an inevitable outcome of the East Asian model, either a normal phenomenon emerging at a certain stage of generic economic development or a by-product of failed speed control of the switchover process from government-led to market-led economy. If the argument that the East Asian model should be discarded because currency crises erupted in East Asia were to hold true, then the following arguments should also be valid. Capitalism, a U.S. model, should have been done away with after the Great Depression, and
Scandinavian countries should have turned away from being welfare states after their foreign currency crisis. The structural vulnerability of East Asian economy is a necessary condition for foreign currency crises but not a sufficient condition. That is, for a currency crisis to occur, structural vulnerability has to be present, but that alone does not cause the currency crisis. The U.S. went through massive fiscal deficit and current account deficit and deterioration of manufacturing sector competition during the 1980s. However, with the U.S. dollar being the key currency, it was able to avoid a currency crisis. China and Japan also managed to bypass the last currency crisis in East Asia. Second-guessing any currency crisis and uncovering structural vulnerability is enough to make every economic problem a cause of currency crisis. It is true that structural vulnerability heightens the likelihood of a currency crisis, thus economic reform that would eliminate structural vulnerability should not be denied. What should be kept in mind, however, is the economic costs accompanying the structural reform. It takes more than just policy efforts to resolve the structural vulnerability of developing countries; it takes endogenous development of market system and market function along economic growth, which takes time. Causal Relationship between East Asian Development Model and Currency Crises The discussion so far can be encapsulated as following: Structural vulnerability of the East Asian economy exists but there are not enough logical grounds for it to have originated from the East Asian model. Had the issue of government-controlled finance been resolved and had capital market liberalization taken proper steps, the currency crises could have been avoided. Therefore, no clear causal relationship exists between the East Asian model and currency crises. The argument that the East Asian model has delayed the elimination of structural vulnerability, although structural vulnerability found among the East Asian countries is fundamentally manifestation of their backwardness, is worth noting. This delay effect arises from two factors, one the phenomenon of inertia and the other the phenomenon of lack of incentive. The phenomenon of inertia occurs when the achievement of the East Asian model over decades is so great that overconfidence of its effect has led the East Asians to ignore the demand for change. The phenomenon of lack of incentive occurs when, as a result of government-led development over decades in East Asia, the need for developing market principles did not grow. The government assumed the role that should have been played by the market and, the achievement being satisfactory, the East
Asian countries came to believe that they would not run into serious problems even if market principles did not operate properly. In East Asia, government intervention was justified on the ground of market failure. However, the more desirable approach was for the government to create a virtuous cycle of setting market development as an ultimate goal and consistently executing deregulation and system building measures that correspond to the goal and accordingly reducing government involvement by degrees.