First and foremost, the Asian crisis is a cautionary tale about rapid financial liberalization
in emerging markets. The Asian economies had gone far in creating a stable macroeconomic
environment and in liberalizing trade and investment regimes, at least for a wide range of tradable manufactured goods. Most of their vulnerabilities in the mid-1990s arose as a result of rapid financial liberalization undertaken in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Well-functioning financial systems require a much stronger legal and regulatory infrastructure than do regimes for open trade and foreign direct investment. In all of the more advanced industrialized economies,financial transactions are heavily supervised and regulated to a much greater degree than trade and investment transactions. Financial markets are far from being free and open, as is sometimes supposed. The Asian economies simply had not developed sufficient capacity in managing a market-based financial sector.