Following Thailand’s 1997 economic crisis, one precondition of IMF funding was to
introduce a number of constitutional, regulatory and corporate governance reforms to bring
Thailand’s financial and political systems into alignment with developed market economies such
as the U.S. As documented by White (2004), attempts to implement these reforms have been
effectively neutralized by corporate interests, the military and political parties, which may be
indicative of the difficulty in changing the “corruption-culture” of a society.