4. APPICATIONS TO THE CASE OF MALAYSIA AND THAILAND: POLICY CONVERGENCE
As noted above, the two countries did experience significant policy convergence prior to the crisis, at least with respect to economic policy. Malaysia and Thailand, though quite different in term of socio-political institutional development, adopted similar macroeconomic and microeconomic policies, though, of course,there were differences. Inflation was low in both countries, averaging approximately 3.5 per cent in Malaysia and 5.4 per cent in Thailand in the year leading up to the crisis. Malaysia has had traditionally fewer restrictions on trade than Thailand , but both followed a similar pattern of liberalization beginning in the mid-late 1980s. Fiscal reform was more important in the case of Malaysia, which brought down a double-digit central government deficit (as a percentage of GDP) in the early 1980s to almost a surplus of one per cent by 1996, whereas Thailand had actually achieved a significant surplus in the 1990s. The gap in relative shares of government spending in GDP had substantially narrowed by the 1990s, with the Malaysian share hovering around 22 per cent, and Thailand, 17 per cent (Asian Development Bank 2000). Exchange-rate policies were similar; each eventually sdopted open capital accounts and essentially fixed their currency to the US dollar, allowing some flexibility. Table 4.6 shows very stable exchange rates for Thailand and Malaysia until the crisis.As can be seen in Table 4.7, each country ran very high current account deficts in the years leading up the crisis (5-8 per cent of GDP in Thailand and 6-10 per cent in Malaysia for the period 1994-96) and did little if anything to correct them (see ‘Lawson Doctrine’). Direct foreigninvestment policies were similar in that each adopted ‘negative lists’ (rather than more restrictive ‘positive’lists ) and created one-stop investment centres. Inflows of FDI were among the largest in the developeing world in the 1980s, but had slowed considerably by the mid-1990s (at least relative to GDP growth ), whereas short-term portfolio flows boomed. Each country experienced salient speculative financial bubbles leading up to the crisis.