SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This chapter reviews the Latin American growth disaster of the 1980s and considers its implications for the causes of the Asian financial crisis. The impressive growth performances of a small group of Asian countries made those countries an ideological battlefield (Wade 1996). For those of a neoclassical persuasion, it became important to demonstrate that the so-called miracles achieved their miracles by following orthodox policy dogma, especially ‘sound macro fundamentals’. It was equally important to the heterodox school to claim the ‘miracles’ as their own. When ‘show case’ countries transubstantiated into ‘basket cases’ (see Pincus and Ramli 1998), each school sought an explanation consistent with its particular political economy.