Contagion Transmission and Systemic Risk
The Asian economic crisis, which originated in Thailand with the sudden devaluation of the Thai baht, rapidly spilled over into the neighbouring economies through three channels: geographical proximity and communication; trade and competitive devaluation; and signalling. The geographical proximity channel, as measured by the physical distance and telecommunication interactions between Thailand and other Asia-5 economies, does not appear to have been very significant, however. The trade and competitive devaluation channel also does not, appear to have been important, despite the large similarity of export goods of over 40% (see Table 5, Col. 4). The most important channel for the transmission of crisis contagion from Thailand to the other Asia-5 countries seems to have occurred through the signalling channel. The collapse of the Thai baht warned foreign investors that the fragility of the Thai financial system was replicated in the other Asian economies. This caused the run by foreign creditors to withdraw capital from South Korea, Malaysia and then Indonesia.
The rapid regional spillover of the crisis contagion from Thailand induced the IMF to intervene and bail out the crisis victims and stem the spread of the crisis beyond the region to the global economy. The economic justification for intervention in the financial markets was that the offer of a bailout, deposit insurance, or the imposing of reserve requirements was aimed at preventing the crisis contagion from snowballing into systemic risk causing the collapse of the whole financial system. There are at least two grounds for intervention or bailouts to prevent crisis contagion from becoming a full-blown systemic risk. First, the divergence between social and private risk, because private agents fail to internalise the costs of contagion risks. Secondly, market failure to price risks efficiently because of the focus on short-term gains, regardless of the soundness of long-term fundamentals, just as Keynes' metaphor on beauty contests explained,that a selection in a beauty contest is made on the basis of what other judges consider to be beauty rather than who fundamentally is the true beauty in the contest. Thus, decision-making based on herd behaviour unrelated to the true macroeconomic fundamentals, even when these are sound, can precipitate a financial crisis.
The IMF Bailout Package
The IMF, in collaboration with other multilateral agencies (World Bank and Asian Development Bank) and the bilateral agencies, provided nearly $112 million in foreign reserves to the central banks of the three crisis-ravaged Asian economies to meet the debt service and repayment needs of foreign creditors (see Table 6).
The IMF bailout strategy aimed to restore confidence amongst foreign creditors by replenishing foreign exchange reserves in the Asian central banks. It was hoped that exchange rates would thereby be stabilised and the outflow of foreign capital reversed. By the end of the first phase in 1997, it was evident that the IMF bailout package had failed to restore market confidence and halt the exodus of capital from Asia-5 economies. A telling indicator of this failure was the downgrading of Asia-5 credit rating to junk bond status by the international credit-rating agencies.
Several explanations have been proffered for the failure of the first phase of the IMF bailout package.
First, the IMF's institutional view that the Asian crisis was triggered by weak macroeconomic fundamentals rather than by self-fulfilling creditor panic was not conducive to confidence-building amongst international investors. Second, the IMF's attempt to implement radical financial-sector and macroeconomic restructuring as a pre-condition for disbursing
the bailout to crisis-torn economies exacerbated the panic. There is ample evidence from past manias and panics that any attempt to carry out drastic structural reforms in the midst of a creditor panic tends to inflame the panic and worsen the crisis.18 Third, the stringent macroeconomic disciplinary targets such as the achievement of budget surpluses of nearly 1 % of GDP per annum, interest rate hikes, credit crunches and other restrictive policies accelerated the slide
towards recession rather than recovery. Fourth, the closure of unviable banks and financial institutions spawned a liquidity crisis and this prevented exportoriented industries from obtaining working capital and opening letters of credit to facilitate trade and make use of the opportunities created by the massive depreciation. Fifth, the tranched disbursement of the bail out funds subject to strict conditionality and arduous negotiations emasculated the IMF's role as a quasi lender of last resort. Sixth, the linking of longterm structural reform to the short-term need to provide finance represented an unnecessary distraction. The IMF bailout failed to provide the liquidity required to avoid the insolvency of financial insti