Economic Crisis in Asia: The Case of Thailand

The economic crisis in Asia has been analyzed by neoliberal and neo-Weberian scholars as a financial crisis, with the neoliberals asserting that its causes are internal to the countries in question, the neo-Weberians asserting the causes to be external. This paper offers an alternative, Marxian explanation of the crisis, focusing on the outbreak of the crisis in Thailand. Using Harvey’s ideas about capitalist crises and capital switching, along with conceptions of crisis dynamics in peripheral societies based in the works of economic geographers and dependent development theorists, I argue that the crisis in Thailand was a fully economic crisis involving all circuits of the economy, linking domestic and international accumulation processes, and stemming in part from struggles over appropriation of the surplus. In order to demonstrate this, I analyze the crisis in Thailand at both national and international scales and show that it was rooted in declining profitability of manufacturing in a context of increased global export competition and overcapacity. This context created the strong likelihood of economic downturn throughout the region, with Thailand falling first because of its specific liabilities, and other countries being pulled into the maelstrom of devaluation through financial contagion effects.