Early in the crisis, almost all analysts (led by the IMF) pointed towards weaknesses in the
Asian economies and corruption-cum moral hazard, and a few (notably the editorial page of the
Wall Street Journal) laid the blame mainly on the initial devaluations. Panic and weaknesses in
international capital markets were not the explanations of choice, though we favored such a view
in our first assessment of the crisis (Radelet and Sachs, 1998a). Now, one year later, the
underlying weaknesses in international financial markets are much more widely recognized, with
widespread calls for changes in the international financial architecture. Some individual analysts,
such as Paul Krugman, have substantially changed their point of view on the causes of the crisis.
His initial analysis (Krugman, 1998) argued that problems within the Asian economies, combined
with corruption and moral hazard, led to wild over-investment and a boom-bust cycle largely
anticipated by rational market participants. A more recent analysis (Krugman, 1999) argues that
such weaknesses cannot explain the depth and severity of the crisis, nor the fact that it occurred in
so many countries simultaneously, and instead lays the blame on financial panic and overly