Corporate Governance, Competition, and Finance: Re-thinking Lessons from the Asian Crisis

Abstract

This paper critically examines the Greenspan-Summers-IMF thesis concerning the Asian crisis, which suggested that the fundamental causes of the Asian crisis lay in the microeconomic behavior of economic agents in these societies--in the Asian way of doing business. The paper concentrates on corporate governance and competition in emerging markets and outlines the international significance of these issues in the context of the New International Financial Architecture and the Doha Development Agenda at the WTO. It reviews new analyses and fresh evidence on corporate governance, on corporate finance, and on competition in emerging and mature markets, to suggest that the basic thesis above is not valid and the consequent policy proposals are therefore deeply flawed.Corporate Control; Finance