Empirical Indicators of Currency Crises in East Asia

The paper is concerned with identifying useful indicators of the probability of currency crises in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea and Thailand over a period of 22 years, where a currency crisis is defined as a large and infrequent devaluation of a local currency. The leading crisis indicators include international and domestic factors; but they are dominated by the leading indicators from the financial sector, such as the ratio of short-term debt to foreign reserves, the ratio of M2 to foreign reserves, and the indicator representing a regional contagion effect. This result is interpreted as pointing to external illiquidity together with adverse shifts in the market sentiment as the likely catalyst for the 1997–98 East Asia crisis.