Geographical perspectives on the Asian economic crisis

While some observers have argued that the Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s is over, there seems to be little consensus regarding the origins, causes, and impacts of the events that transpired. This should not be too surprising, given that the economic and political turmoil of the period between 1997 and 1999 was suciently profound as to provoke a renewed round of debate on many contentious issues relating to the nature of change in East and Southeast Asia, ranging from factor productivity and female economic participation, to the developmental state and democratisation. Despite the essentially spatial nature of the events in question, and the centrality of geographical concepts such as di€usion, embeddedness, multi-scalar dynamics and the construction of space, geographers have been relatively silent in this debate (the few exceptions include Daly and Logan, 1998; Dixon, 1999; Poon and Perry, 1999; Yeung, 1999, 2000a; Lin, 2000). The collection of papers brought together here, ®rst presented at the 1999 annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Hawaii, forms a collective e€ort among geographers to contribute to wider social scienti®c discourses on the crisis and to public policy debates that shape the everyday life of millions of people in Asia and elsewhere. In this brief introduction, we ®rst highlight the diverse cross-disciplinary understandings of the crisis and the ways in which it has been experienced and represented in various national contexts. The second section then highlights the distinctive sensibilities and perspectives that geographers bring to the analyses of the Asian economic crisis. Finally, we re ̄ect more broadly upon the geographer's role in the public policy arena, and the relative paucity of geographical literature (to date) on the Asian economic crisis.