The Episodes of Currency Crisis in Latin American and Asian Economies

This volume presents six monographs of currency crisis episodes in two Latin American countries in 1994-1995 (Mexico and Argentine) and four Asian countries in 1997-1998 (Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Korea). The Asian part of this volume is supplemented with a short comparative note, commenting these four monographs. All the studies were prepared under the research project no. OI44/H02/99/17 on "Analysis of Currency Crises in Countries of Asia, Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe: Lessons for Poland and Other Transition Countries", carried out by CASE and financed by the Committee for Scientific Research (KBN) in the years 1999-2001. They were subjects of public presentation and discussion during the seminar in Warsaw organized by CASE on December 21, 2000, under the same research project. In the all analyzed cases currency crises were accompanied by other signs of financial turbulence such as (public and/or private) debt crisis or banking crisis. However, the limited scope of the conducted analysis forced the research team to concentrate on the currency crises and refer to banking and debt crisis only as the background or consequence of the currency devaluation. This collection of papers will be followed by another volume presenting episodes of currency crises in the European transition economies.