The Asian Financial Crisis : Causes, consequences and lessons learned

The Asian financial crisis is undoubtedly one of the most severe events in the recent history. The region of Southeast Asia went through a really hard time and the economies there needed a lot of efforts to recover from this massive downturn. The negative consequences of the crisis affected not only Asia but also the entire world economy. Even though the Asian economies were emerging in a great tempo, it turned out that they were vulnerable to crisis. The goal of this paper is to answer three main questions: (1) what caused the Asian financial crisis; (2) how did the situation in Asia look like afterwards and (3) what lessons have we learned. The theoretical macroeconomic fundamentals are presented in the first half of the work. The three main questions are then answered in the second half of the paper from the perspective of the built theoretical basis. The paper ends with the ninth and last chapter, making a summary and considering the recent global financial crisis as a background. This work was written under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Hansjörg Herr and Prof. Dr. Trevor Evans, both teaching at the Berlin School of Economics and Law in Germany.