External currency pricing and the East Asian crisis

This paper provides a quantitative investigation of the East Asian crisis of 1997-1999. We stress two essential features of the crisis. First, the crisis was a regional phenomenon; the depth and severity of the crisis were exacerbated by a large decline in regional demand. Second, the predominance of the US dollar in the pricing of export goods in Asia (which we document empirically) led to a powerful internal propagation effect of the crisis within the region, contributing greatly to the decline in regional trade flows. We construct a multi-country macroeconomic model which contains these two features and show that it can do a good job in accounting for the response of the main macroeconomic aggregates in Korea, Malaysia and Thailand during the crisis. A key advantage of our model is that it can explain the very slow response of exports to the large real exchange rate depreciations that took place during the crisis. Without the regional dimension and dollar pricing of exports, we find that the model fails to account for the depth and severity of the crisis.