The measures of corruption and law and
order cover 1982}95. The measures of corporate governance are calculated
primarily using data for the early and mid-1990s.
In their Global Emerging Markets (June, 1998) Flemings Research develops an
alternative measure of corporate governance across emerging markets. They
asked their country specialists to consider `the disclosure of information,
trans-parency of ownership structures, management and special interest groups,
adequacy of the legal system, whether the standards that are set are actually
enforced, and if the boards of companies are independent and the rights of
minority shareholders are upheld (p. 19). This index therefore tries to capture
the extent of shareholder rights in practice. The index runs from one to five with
a higher score meaning more rights and they note that `a score of 5 would be
awarded to the US } our model market (p. 20). One disadvantage of this
measure is that it was published in spring 1998, and therefore could in part
reflect reassessments of shareholder rights in light of the Asian crisis.
We test the importance of alternative measures of macroeconomic policy and
institutional structure using regressions with the change in the value of the
nominal exchange rate on the left-hand side. We then test the leading contenders
using additional control variables and in multiple regressions. Our regressions
also include a dummy variable for being in East Asia, in case there is an
Asian-specific element to the crisis (e.g., countries are affected just because they