Asia-Europe Relations in the Light of the Southeast Asian Financial Crisis

From the European Union's point of view, the overriding reason for pushing the formation of the Asia Europe Leaders' Meeting or ASEM was so that the EU would not, to quote the 1994 European Commission strategy paper, 'lose out on the economic miracle taking place in Asia' (1). US and particularly Japanese capital already had a commanding position in the region and continued to flow in in massive quantities. Unless European investment came into Asia and trade expanded between the two regions, Europe was headed for a geo-economic debacle.

I wonder what is going on in Brussels today in the way of a reassessment in the light of the financial crisis occurring in Southeast Asia. For what has happened, in lightning fashion, in the last few months, is that from being the much-acclaimed driver of the world economy in the 21st century, Asia, or at least a very significant part of it, Southeast Asia, is becoming a source of global financial turmoil. What I would like to do here is to examine various dimensions of the financial crisis gripping the region, focussing on Thailand and the Philippines, then return at the end to drawing out some implications for ASEM.

In the last three and a half months, the Philippines and Southeast Asia have been gripped by a crisis from which there seems to be no relief. The Philipine peso has lost close to 30 per cent of its dollar value, the Thai baht about 47 per cent, the Malaysian ringgit 32 per cent, and the Indonesia rupiah 54 per cent.

Governments throughout the region are paralysed by the crisis. In the case of Thailand, the ruling coalition has lost its last ounce of credibility as people look toward the curious combination of the King and the IMF for salvation in these frightening times. In the Philippines, the Ramos administration is reduced to telling the people to count their blessings because the crisis is worse in Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

Crisis of a model

The crisis hitting Southeast Asia today is no mere transient event from which the region will soon recover, as capital flows back to the tiger economies. For the crisis is that of a model of development, one that is dependent on huge infusions of foreign capital, one that is guided by the illusion that, as the Business Times of Singapore puts it 'countries could leapfrong the normally long and arduous course to advanced country status simply by maximizing their access to foreign capital infows'. Let us look at this model in some detail, for in fully understanding it lies the key to the current conjuncture.

More than in the case of the newly industrialising countries of Northeast Asia, the Southeast Asian NICs have been dependent for their economic growth on foreign capital inflows. The first phase of this process occurred between the mid-1980s and 1990s, when a massive inflow of capital from Japan occurred, lifting the region out of recession, and triggering a decade of high growth.

Owing to the Plaza Accord of 1985, which drastically revalued the yen relative to the dollar, forcing the Japanese to seek out low-cost production sites outside Japan so they could remain globally competitive, some $15 billion in Japanese direct investment flowed into the region between 1986 and 1990. This infusion brought with it not only billions more in Japanese aid and bank capital but also an ancillary flow of capital from the first generation NICs of Taiwan, Korea, and Hong Kong.

By the early 1990s, however, Japanese direct investment inflows were levelling off or, as in the case of Thailand, falling off. By that time, however, the Southeast Asian countries had become addicted to foreign investment. The challenge confronting the political and economic elites of Southeast Asia was how to bridge the massive gap between the limited savings and investments of the ASEAN countries and the massive investments they needed for their strategy of 'fast track capitalism' that, in their view, would bring about the happy union of prosperity for them, development for all, and political stability.

But happily for them, a second source of foreign capital opened up in the early 1990s, and this was the vast amounts of personal savings, pension funds, corporate savings, and other funds that were deposited in mutual funds and other investment institutions that sought to maximise their value by placing them in highly profitable enterprises. These funds were largely American. In the early 1990s, noted an Asian Development Bank report, 'the declining returns in the stock markets of industrial countries and the low real interest rates compelled investors to seek higher returns on their capital elsewhere' (2).

These funds were not, however, going to come in automatically, without a congenial climate. To attract these funds, financial managers throughout Southeast Asia devised the similar approaches, strategies that has the same three key elements:

• financial liberalisation, or the elimination of foreign exchange and other restrictions to the inflow and outflow of capital, fully opening up stock exchanges to the participation of foreign portfolio investors, allowing foreign banks to participate more fully in domestic banking operations, and opening up other financial sectors, like the insurance industry, to foreign players.
• maintaining high domestic interest rates relative to interest rates in the US and other world financial centers, in order to suck in speculative capital that would seek to capture the spread between, say, returns of sive to six per cent in New York and 12 to 15 per cent in Manila or Bangkok; and
• fixing the exchange rate between the local currency and the dollar to eliminate or reduce risks for foreign investors stemming from the fluctuations in the value of the region's 'soft currencies'. This guarantee was needed if investors were going to come in, change their dollars in pesos, baht, or rupiah, play the stock market, or buy high-yielding government bonds, and transform their capital and their profits back into dollars and move to other markets.

Of course, the mix of financial liberalisation, interest rate policy, and exchange rate policy was different in different countries, and it was greatly nuanced by the varying appreciation of other factors such as inflation and recession, but the thrust in the manipulaton of these policy tools was in the same general direction.

This policy was wildly successful in achieving its objective of attracting foreign investment and finance capital. The Americans, in particular, were heavy players, with US mutual funds supplying net new capital to the region in the order to $4 to $5 billion a year for the past few years (3).

Siamese twins

In the case of Thailand, net portfolio investment or speculative capital inflow came to around $24 billion, while another $50 billion came in the form of loans via the Bangkok International Banking Facility (BIBF), which allowed foreign and local banks to make dollar loans at much lower rates of interest than those on baht loans. With the wide spread-some 600 to 700 basis points-between US interest rates and interest rates on baht loans, local banks could borrow abroad and still make a clean profit relending to local customers at lower rates than those charge to baht loans.

Thai banks and finance companies had no problems borrowing abroad. With the ultimate collateral being an economy that was growing at an average rate of 10 per cent per annum-the fastest in the world in the decade 1985-95-Bangkok became a creditors' market. As one article in a business magazine in 1995 put it, 'With the country's positive outlook, competition to lend ot Thai banks and finance companies has been intense...[and] ....as a result of stiff competition, pricing levels in some cases are not presented entirely in the financial fundamentals of the borrower. Many banks in Asia are anxious to develop good relations with their Thai counterparts, and are increasingly willing to lend to build relationship rather than to make money' (4).

The massive inflow of foreign capital did not alarm the World Bank and the IMF, though short-term debt came to $41 billion of Thailand's $83 billion foreign debt by 1995. In fact, the Bank and the the Fund were not greatly bothered by the conjunction of skyrocketing foreign debt and burgeoning current account deficit, which came to 6-8 per cent of GDP in the mid-1990s. As late as 1994, the official line of the World Bank on Thailand was: Thailand provides an excellent example of the dividents to be obtained through outward orientaton, receptivity to foreign investment, and a market-friendly philosophy backed by conservative macro-economic management and cautious external borrowing policies.

Indeed, as late as 1996, while expressing some concern with the huge capital flows, the IMF was still praising Thai authorities for their 'consistent record of sound macro-economic management policies' ( 5). While the IMF 'recommended a greater degree of exchange rate flexibility' (6), there was certainly no advice to let the baht float freely.

The complacency of the Bretton Woods institutions when it came to Thailand-indeed, their failure to fully appreciate the danger signals-is traced by some analysts to the fact that it was not incurred and financed by government but by the private sector. Indeed, the high current account deficits of the early 1990s coincided with the government running budget surpluses. As a group of perceptive Indian analysts noted, 'part of the reason for this silence was the perception that an external account deficit is acceptable so long as it does not reflect a deficit on the government's budget but 'merely' an excess of private investment over private domestic savings'. In this view, countries with significant budget deficits, such as India in 1991, were regarded as profligate even when their current account deficit was lower than Thailand's. The latter's deficit, because it was not incurred by government and not financed by public expenditures was simply reflecting 'the appropriate environment for foreign private investment rather than public or private profligacy' (7).

Turning to the Philippines, Manila's technocrats were in the early 1990s very hungry for foreign capital since the country had been, for reasons of political stability, skirted by the massive inflow of Japanese investment into the Southeast Asian region in the late 1980s. Eager to join the front ranks of the Asian tigers, the Philippine technocrats saw Bangkok as a worthy example to follow and in the next few years, in matters of macro-economic strategy, the Philippines became Siam's twin. Cloned by Manila, the formula of financial liberalisation, high interest rates, and a virtually fixed exchange rate, attracted some $19.4 billion worth of net portfolio investment into the country between 1993 and 1997. And dollar loans via the Foreign Currency Deposit Units (FCDUs)-Manila's equivalent of the Bangkok International Banking Facility-rose from $2 billion at the end of 1993 to $11.6 billion as of March 1997. As one investment house put it, with the peso 'padlocked' at 26.2 to 26.3 to the dollar since September 1995, 'they are not fools in Manila. They were offered US dollars at 600 basis points cheaper than the peso rates along with currency protection from the BSP [the central bank]. They took it' (8).

Has these foreign capital inflows gone into the truly productive sectors of the economy, like manufacturing and agriculture, the story might have been different. But they went instead principally to fuel asset-inflation in the stock market and in real estate, which were seen as the most attractive areas in terms of providing high yield with a quick turnaround time. In fact, the predictable boom in real estate acted to siphon away capital from manufacturing in Thailand and the Philippines, as manufacturers, instead of plowing their profits into upgrading their technology or the skills of their work force, gambled much of them in real estate or stock market speculation.

The inflow of foreign portfolio investment and foreign loans into real estate led to a constructon frenzy that has resulted in a situation of massive oversupply of residential and commercial properties from Bangkok to Jakarta. In Bangkok, at the end of 1996, an estimated $20 billion worth of new residential and commercial property in Bangkok remained unsold, and yet building cranes continued to dot the landscape as developers rushed new highrises to completion. In Manila, the question is no longer if there is a glut in real estate. The question is how big it will ultimately be, with one investment analyst projecting that by the year 2000, the supply of highrise residential uints will exceed demand by 211 per cent while the supply of commerical units will outpace demand by 142 per cent ( 9). Indeed, in their efforts to cut their losses in the developing glut, real estate developers are now pouring billions into building resorts and golf courses! (10)

All this has spelled bad news for commercial banks in Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia since they are heavily exposed in terms of real estate loans. As a percentage of commercial banks' total exposure, real estate or real-estate-related loans come to 15 to 20 per cent in the case of the Philippines and Thailand and 20 to 25 per cent in the case of Malaysia and Indonesia. In Thailand, where the exposure in real estate is said to be underestimated by official figures and is estimated by some to come to as high as 40 per cent of total bank loans (11), it is estimated that half of the loans made to property developers were 'non-performing', with the total value of these loans estimated at between $3.1 billion and $3.8 billion (12).

Stampede and speculation

It was the massive oversupply in the real estate sector and the realisation that many of the country's finance companies that had borrowed heavily, floated bonds, or sold equities to foreign portfolio investors and banks that made foreign investors reassess their position in the country in the beginning of 1997. And they panicked and began to move out when they saw the real estate glut in the context of the country's deteriorating macro-economic fundamentals, like a current account deficit that came to 8.2 per cent of GDP (a figure similar to Mexico's at the time of that country's crisis in December 1993); an export growth rate of zero in 1996; and a burgeoning foreign debt of $89 billion, half of which was due in a few months' time.

This move to get out of Thailand meant unloading trillions of baht for dollars, and with too many baht chasing too few dollars, naturally the result was a tremendous downward pressure on the value of the baht. This attracted the speculators, who sought to make profits from the well-timed purchases and unloading of baht and dollars. The Bank of Thailand tried to defend the baht at around 25 bath to one dollar, but the foreign investors' stampede that speculators rode on was simply too strong, with the result that the central bank lost $9 billion of its $39 billion reserves before it threw in the towel and let the baht float 'to seek its own value' on July 2.

The same drama was re-enacted in Manila, Jakarta, and Kuala Lumpur, where the same macro-economic strategy had produced the same flaws and the same weaknesses. It was these flaws of a macroeconomic development strategy built on attracting huge infusions of capital that created the regional financial crisis. Speculators merely took advantage of a developing crisis that was largely self-created. There was not grand Jewish conspiracy led by George Soros.

Points to ponder

Let me now return to ASEM and Asia, and say that it would be wise for European governments and European NGOs to ponder on several implications of the financial earthquake of the last few months for the Southeast Asian region, since these will have an impact on Euro-Asian relations in the near future.

• Strategic withdrawal
  
  

  First, despite statements made by some Southeast Asian governments that the crisis is a short term one-a phase in the normal ebb and flow of global capital-there is a strategic withdrawal of finance capital from the Southeast Asian region. The new darlings of the fund managers are Latin American markets, which rose almost 40 per cent on average this year as Asian markets fell. As the Financial Times points out, Brasilian equities, which have risen 70 per cent since the end of the year, look very good to fund managers. So do Russian equities, which have more than doubled since the start of this year, and Chinese 'red chips,' which have gone up by 90 per cent ( 13).

  Capital movements are, contrary to the doctrinaire free market views, dictated by a mixture of rationality and irrationality. As the deputy managing director of the IMF recently admitted during the World Bank-IMF annual meeting in Hong Kong, 'markets are not always right. Sometimes inflows are excessive, and sometimes they may be sustained too long. Markets tend to react late; but then they tend to react fast, sometimes excessively' ( 14). But one thing is certain, foreign capital is not so irrational as to return to Southeast Asia anytime soon.

  Most likely is the scenario of prolonged crisis layed out by the chairman of a key player in the Asian investment scene, Salomon Brothers Asia Pacific. US mutual funds, he said, which had been supplying net new capital to the region of $4 to $5 billion a year, were now pulling out owing to the bleak investment outlook. The currency instability would last from seven to 12 months, if the earlier experiences of Mexico, Finland, and Sweden were any indication, during which there would be weak domestic demand and 'severe contraction in GDP in some of them' ( 15).

• Will FDI also fly?
  
  

  A second consideration is the question: Will foreign direct investors follow the lead of the banks and portfolio investors and pull their capital out of the region? With the slow growth in the region's exports and the spread of deflationary tendencies, new foreign investors are likely to be deterred from making significant commitments, and Ford and GM, for one, are now probably regretting their 1996 decision to set up major automobile assembly plants in Thailand to churn out cars for what was then seen as an infinitely growing Southeast Asian market.

  It is not clear, however, how Japanese direct investors will react. Some analysts say that new investment flows from Japan are not likely to be reduced that much since the Japanese are continuing to pursue a strategic plan of making Southeast Asia an integrated production base. In Thailand alone, it is pointed out, more than 1,100 Japanese companies are ensconced and only a massive economic downturn can reverse the momentum that has built up. As one Japanese executive asserted, 'It [Japanese investment] is a long-term strategy where investments are increased on a year-to-year basis, so I don't think a 10 to 20 per cent devaluation will force Japanese investors to change their investment strategies for Thailand' ( 16).

  However, there is a new wrinkle to the situation that makes the situation different from the early 1990s. First of all, Japanese investment strategies in the last few years have targetted Southeast Asia not just as an export platform for third-country markets but increasingly as prosperous middle-class markets to be themselves exploited-and these markets are expected to contract severely.

  Second, diverting production from Southeast Asian markets to Japan will be difficult since Japan's recession, instead of giving way to recovery, as expected earlier this year, is becoming even deeper, with an astounding 11 per cent decline in GDP on an annualised basis recorded in the second quarter!

  Finally, redirecting production to the US is going to be very difficult, unless the Japanese want to provoke the wrath of Washington, which is already warning Japan not to 'export its way out of its recession' and is increasingly responsive to claims from US manufacturers that the Southeast Asian economies' trade surpluses with the United States are really mainly trade surpluses registered by Japanese companies that have relocated to the region-implying that they must be added to Japan's official trade surplus with the United States.

  The upshot of all this is that Japan could be burdened with significant overcapacity in its Southeast Asian manufacturing network, which could trigger a significant plunge in the level of fresh commitments of capital. Indeed, just a few days ago, Toyota said it would not be making fresh investments in Thailand. Developments like these can only deepen and prolong the regional recession.

• Liberalisation-advancing or retreating?
  
  

  A third key consideration relates to the question of whether the crisis will result in an advance or in a retreat of economic liberalisation. While many Asian economic managers are now coming around to the position that the weak controls on the flow of international capital has been a major cause of the currency crisis, US officials and economists are taking exactly the opposite position: that it was incomplete liberalisation that was one of key causes of the crisis (17). The fixing of the exchange rate has been identified as the major culprit by Northern analysts (18), conveniently forgetting that many portfolio investors had emphasised the stability that fixed rates brought to the local investment scene and not even the IMF had advocated a truly free float for Third World currencies owing to its fears of the inflationary pressures and other forms of economic instability this might generate.

  But the agenda of the US has been bigger than advocacy of the freely floating currency, and this includes the accelerated deregulation, privatisation, and liberalisation of trade in goods and services in a part of the world which many American corporations regard as one of the world's most protectionist and government-managed in economic orientation. Formerly, the economic clout of the Southeast Asian countries enabled them to successfully resist Washington's demands for faster trade liberalisation. Indeed, they were able to derail Washington's push to transform the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) into a free trade area (19). But with the changed situation, this may no longer be possible, and Washington may work via the IMF to complete the liberalisation or structural adjustment of the economies where the process was aborted (with the significant exception of financial liberalisation) in the late eighties owing to the cornucopia of Japanese investment. Indeed, even without prodding from Washington, in their desperate desire to keep foreign capital in the country, Thai authorities have removed all limitations on foreign ownership of Thai financial firms and are pushing ahead with even more liberal foreign investment legislation to allow foreigners to own land. Jakarta has abolished a 49 per cent limit for foreign investors to buy IPO shares in publicly listed companies (20).

  Under IMF tutelage, the Philippines is already the most structurally adjusted country in East Asia, and Thailand is now in the process of being radically liberalised by the IMF. As a number of us predicted earlier, Indonesia has also joined the IMF queue, and though Mr. Mahathir has vowed never to go to the IMF, many wonder how long he can hold on this stance. What this means is that with the generalisation of Fund-directed structural adjustment, Southeast Asia may be on the threshold of an era of minimal or low and fluctuating growth such as that which characterised Latin America and the Philippines in the period 1980-1993, when they underwent fairly comprehensive and thorough adjustment programs at the hands of the World Bank and the Fund.

• Crisis and opportunity
  
  

  A final consideration is perhaps the most important one, particularly for those of you in European NGOs that increasingly share a common program and vision with many of us in Southeast Asia. This is that the current crisis may in fact translate into opportunity for the progressive movement. For it opens up the space for people to once again entertain alternative paths to development, to strategies whose consideration has been blocked by the hold on the popular imagination of the illusion of permanently high growth rates, leading to the gradual amelioration of poverty and inequality, promoted by the model of foreign-capital-fueled fast track growth model within the context of accelerated integration of the local economy into the global economy.

  Controls on capital flows are the first step in any strategy, a defensive move that is a sine qua non for the success of an alternative development strategy. For as Singapore's Business Times, a paper which is not exactly noted for radicalism has pointed out, 'Short-term capital inflows are of highly dubious benefit when all they do is to finance asset inflation (stocks and real estate) and a nation is arguably better off without them' (21).

  The so-called 'Tobin Tax' (named after its proponent, the US economist Jame Tobin), a transactions tax imposed on all cross-border flows of capital that are not clearly earmarked as direct investment would help slow down the frenzied and increasingly irrational movements of finance capital. A slowing down of the movements of speculative capital would also be accomplished by a measure used by the Chileans and advocated by University of the Philippines Professor Solita Monsod: require portfolio investors to make an interest-free deposit of an amount equal to 30 per cent of their investment that they would not be able to withdraw for one or more years. This would make them think twice before pulling out at the scent of higher yields elsewhere.

  The aim is not to discourage foreign direct investment. Such measures would create a strong disincentive for speculative capital to arbitrarily enter and exit, with all the destabilising consequences of this movements, but would not penalise direct investors that are making more strategic commitments of their capital. Or as William Greider puts it, mechanisms like these 'would not destroy globalized markets, but should greatly reduce the unproductive daily turnovers in currencies and other assets, thus increasing stability in money values' (22).

  Foreign direct investment, of course, brings with it its own problems, and it must be managed by a related system of incentives based on, among other considerations, the strategic objective of acquiring technology. As with portfolio investment, it would pay to be critical, for as the Singapore business paper cited above warns: Long-term flows can be of greater benefit but it is questionable whether all of the money that goes into so-called foreign direct investment (FDI) in manufacturing and service industries is as long-term as it purports to be.

  The moment one country is perceived to be becoming less competitive than an emergent neighbour, FDI can prove to be highly footloose and fancy free, as some ASEAN nations have already found. And the benefits it confers by way of technology transfer and productivity gains can be exaggerated (23).

  Such measures, however, would be just the beginning. Enacting and implementing progressive tax legislation is a medium-term measure that must be seriously undertaken, for as the same commentary underlines, The lesson that emerges with increasing clarity from all this is that developing nations, especially those that aspire to rapid development, must give priority to domestic resource mobilization. This means developing efficient (and honest) tax collection systems as well as promoting long-term savings (through provident funds and the like) to support a domestic bond market(24).

  Such measures must, in turn, be part of a larger program of asset and income reform, including effective land reform, that is part of a strategy of enlarging the domestic market to serve as the main engine of growth-something absolutely necessary now that chasing after export markets is being shown as a strategy with no exit except draconian efforts to cheapen wages and living standards in a race to the bottom that benefits only international investors.

  There is in this, of course, the unfinished social justice agenda of the progressive movement, but it is one that is now impelled by the added logic of economic rationality. Achieving economic sustainability based on a viable and dynamic domestic markets can no longer be divorced from measures that promote equity. The post-Keynesian illusion of economic growth based on the formula of opening up export markets and beggaring one's labour force must be banished once and for all, and this is the time to do it.

There are many other elements to a development strategy, and this is not the place to make a detailed listing and analysis of these. But one cannot leave out of this brief discussion the principle of ecological sustainability. For the now discredited model of foreign capital-fueled high-speed growth is leaving behind little that is of positive value and much that is negative. As any visitor to Bangkok these days would testify, 12 years of fast-track capitalism is leaving behind few traces except industrial plant that will be antiquated in a few more years, hundreds of unoccupied highrises, a horrendous traffic problem that is only slightly mitigated by the repossession of thousands of late-model cars from bankrupt owners, a rapid rundown in the country's natural capital, and an environment that has been irretrievably, if not mortally, impaired, to the detriment of future generations. Ecological sustainability, like equity, must be central to any alternative strategy of development that rises on the ruins of the old.

References

1. European Commission, Communication from the Commission to the Council Entitled Towards a New Asia Strategy, Brussels, July 15, 1994.
2. Min Tang and James Villafuerte, Capital Flows to Asian and Pacific Developing Countries: Recent Trends and Future Prospects (Manila: Asian Development Bank, 1995), p. 10.
3. Southeast Asian Nations Face More Market Weakness, Top Banker Says, Business World, Sept. 8, 1997.
4. Thais Market Triumph, Asiamoney, May 1995, p. 16.
5. Quoted in Robert Chote, Thai Crisis Highlights Lessons of Mexico, Survey, Financial Times, Sept. 191, 1997, p. 16.
6. Ghosh et al., p. 2779.
7. Ibid.
8. HG Asia, The Bad News in the Philippines Has Not All Been Told, Asia Communique, Sept. 1997 (Internet version).
9. All Asia, cited in Sheila Oviedo and H.F., Will Real Estate Go Bust?, International Herald Tribune, May 6, 1997.
10. Ibid.
11. Of Currency Cruisis and Financial Stability in Southeast Asia, Internal memo of investment firm requesting anonymity, Sept. 18, 1997.
12. Funds Rushed to Help Developers, The Nation, May 14, 1997, p. B1.
13. A Ride on the Rollercoaster, Financial Times, July 12, 1997.
14. Stanley Fischer, Capital Account Liberaliztion and the Role of the IMF,paper presented at the Asia and the IMF Seminar, Hong Kong, Sept. 19, 1997, p. 4.
15. Southeast Asian Nations Face More Market Weakness, Top Banker Says, Business World, Sept. 8, 1997.
16. K.I. Woo, Doyen of Yamaichi Securities Stays Bullish on Thailand, The Nation, July 18, 1997.
17. Alan Friedman, Globalization Theory Vaults into Reality, International Herald Tribune, Sept. 26, 1997.
18. As one investment analyst saw it, the combination of completely open borders to financial flows and an informally fixed exchange rate was a deadly combination. 'Throughout the period, Thailand's borders have...remained open to international capital flows and this introduces an obvious question to a Thai borrower-if he can borrow US dollars much more cheaply than baht and if the BOT [Bank of Thailand] protected him against currency risk, why should be borrow in baht?', HG Asia, Communique: Thailand (Hong Kong: HG Asia, 1996) (Internet version).
19. See Walden Bello and Joy Chavez-Malaluan, eds., APEC: Four Adjectives in Search of a Noun (Manila: Manila People's Forum on APEC, 1996).
20. Derwin Pereira, Jakarta's Rescue Deal a Bold Step, Straits Times, Sept. 5, 1997.
21. Time for Less Hectic Growth, Business Times, Aug. 20, 1997.
22. Greider, p. 257.
23 Time for Less Hectic Growth.
24. Ibid.