Look around Bangkok at some the unfinished and abandoned highrise buildings, which have been rusting and decaying for years.
Most everyone knows about corruption in the construction and banking businesses, which caused Thailand to have an economic liquidity problem in 1997, which in turn brought down almost all of the rest of Asia's economies. Thailand cleaned up a lot of its act after that, and in fact we are now benefiting from the shock reaction after 1997.
What's not known is just how much corruption helped bring this about. On these big projects, the offers of bribes and kickbacks encouraged many decision makers with authority to approve the loans and licenses for those projects. If those bribes and kickbacks had not been offered, and decisions had been made solely on the economic merits of each project in view of all the similar, competing projects, and market supply and demand, then the Asian collapse would have been much less, or perhaps would never have happened.
This is something to think about every time you look at all the ugly, decaying buildings still in Bangkok's remarkable skyline. (However, many projects were resumed 5 years laters, and some other highrises taken down, so few still exist as of 2010. This article was originally written in the late 1990s.)
There is a related section in ThailandGuru on the 1997 Asia Economic Collapse.