impossible for them to collect on collateral in the event of non-performing loans.
Much has been made of corruption in Asia, with countless commentators arguing that
cronyism and Asian business practices were ultimately at the heart of the crisis. There is little
question that there was extensive corruption in Asia, and that these practices undermined the
allocation of capital and weakened financial systems. Suharto=s growing family empire, for
example, contributed to the crisis both because of the government ultimately guaranteed many
risky investments and because Suharto was unwilling to make the family firms make adjustments
in the early stages of the crisis. But two facts make it hard to argue that the crisis was primarily
the result of corruption. First, corruption on at least a similar scale had existed in Asia for
decades, and yet these economies had grown very rapidly without any sign of a crisis. If anything,
corruption in Korea was probably worse in the mid-1980s than in the mid-1990s, and yet it did
not face a similar crisis at that time.
Second, corruption is a generalized problem in almost all emerging markets. As shown by
Furman and Stiglitz (1998) and Radelet and Sachs (1998b), the Asian crisis economies as a group
do not stand out on business surveys and other measures as being more corrupt than non-crisis
emerging markets. Yes, Indonesia scores at the bottom of almost all rankings, but Thailand scores
comparable to, and Korea higher than, many non-crisis merging markets such as Chile, Colombia,
India, China and Taiwan. Corruption simply is not the obvious characteristic that separates the
crisis countries from the non-crisis emerging markets. That is not to suggest that corruption
either helped these countries or was benign -- far from it. Rather, while cronyism certainly
created some of the vulnerabilities that set the stage for the crisis, it alone cannot account for the
timing, severity, or even location of the crisis.
Creditor Panic?
The third interpretation is based on the idea that the crisis is mainly the result of a self-
fulfilling panic of investors. This interpretation is described in detail in Radelet and Sachs (1998a
and 1998b). This story goes as follows. Yes, there are vulnerabilities: falling foreign exchange
reserves, slowing export growth, fragile financial systems, and overvaluation of the real exchange
rate. But these vulnerabilities are not enough to explain the abruptness and depth of the crisis.
As some have put it, Αthe punishment is much worse than the crime.≅ The solution to this
conundrum is that rational investors may have an incentive to pull money out of an otherwise
healthy country if the other investors are doing the same thing. In more formal terms, the crisis is
a Αbad≅ equilibrium in a situation of multiple equilibria. The bad equilibrium occurs when each
investor comes to expect that the other investors will suddenly pull out their funds. It then
becomes rational for each investor, in fact, to behave just as expected, that is, to suddenly
withdraw the loans that are outstanding. When this happens, a severe economic crisis unfolds.
The key analytical question is when such a self-fulfilling panic can occur. In our view, the
main condition is a high level of short-term foreign liabilities relative to short-term foreign assets.
It is exactly in that situation that each creditor knows that it must flee a country ahead of other