ASIAN VALUES DEVALUED [VIDEO-RECORDING]: REPORT AND ASSESSMENT
This video-recording produced in 1998 chronicles the origins, causes, effects, and outcomes of the so-called Asian financial crisis that began in Southeast Asia in 1997. The presentation in the video-recording limits the review of the financial crisis to events occurring in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Hong Kong. While the financial crisis spread to other countries in Southeast Asia, the economies and societies of these three countries were the first to experience the problems.
The video-recording identifies dichotomies between (a) the drive for rapid economic growth in a globalizing international economy and (b) the corruption, cronyism, and nepotism that had characterized most Southeast Asian economies and societies for at least a century as the precipitating cause of the financial crisis in Southeast Asia. The video-recording, without stating it overtly, implies that the financial crisis was a somewhat sudden phenomenon. The presenters did not mention, as an example, the adverse effect on the Indonesian economy attributed to nepotism, cronyism, and corruption in the 1970s in the program to develop the country's coal resources to allow Indonesia to benefit from the growing demand for energy in the wake of the then growing market power of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). At that time, the economic and financial contagion did not spread to other Southeast Asian economies, but the pattern for the financial collapse of the late-1990s was established.
The video-recording also focuses on the miseries that descended upon ordinary citizens as a consequence of the financial crisis that began in 1997, while contrasting these outcomes to the continuation in most instances of a luxurious lifestyle for the elite who benefited from the nepotism, cronyism, and corruption in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Hong Kong. Most certainly, the outcome portrayed did<...