Southeast Asia and the Asian and Global Financial Crises

Despite the deleterious impact of the 2008-09 global financial crisis, which seriously undermined mainstream economists' claims that the world economy has matured enough to prevent the return of a global depression, policymakers are still grappling with unchartered territory to insulate their economies from debilitating regional and global contagions. This article provides the introduction to a special issue targeted at dissecting the experience of the Southeast Asian market economies in confronting comparatively the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 and the global financial crisis of 2008-09.