4. Macroeconomic measures
Much of the debate over the Asian crisis has focused on the relative importance of five macroeconomic variables: the budget deficit, monetary policy, the current account, foreign exchange reserves, and foreign debt. The raw data for these measures are presented in Table 3. The dependent variable used in this section is the percent loss of purchasing power of exchange rates in emerging markets from the end of 1996 to January 1999.
4.1. Fiscal and monetary policy
Table 3 shows government fiscal balance as a percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 1996 for 25 countries (a minus sign indicates a budget deficit). It is striking that Indonesia had a balanced government budget and none of the Asian countries that experienced a large depreciation had a serious fiscal deficit. Not surprisingly, the first two columns of Table 4 show that the government budget deficit is not significant in the exchange rate regression, either by itself or with the inclusion of the East Asia dummy. The R-squared is 0.09 before we include the East Asia dummy and rises to only 0.10 with that dummy.