In the standard theory of balance of payments crises (Krugman, 1979), the budget deficit should affect the exchange rate through affecting the money supply. Even if budget deficits have no discernible direct effect, there could be an impact via money growth. Table 3 shows the growth rate of broad money in 1996 for 25 countries. It is just significant in the exchange rate regressions at the 10% level with or without the East Asia dummy (columns 3 and 4 of Table 4) when we drop Turkey, which is an extreme outlier with 120% money growth. With Turkey in the sample, broad money growth is significant and negative at the 5% level.
This result should be treated with care. Of the countries with large depreciations, only Russia had significant deficit-induced money growth. Indonesia had high money growth in 1996 and a large depreciation in 1996–98, but its budget was essentially balanced before the crisis. If we drop Indonesia and Turkey, money growth in 1996 is not significant.