Jikon Lai

Nanyang Technological University | ntu · S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies

The character and state of a financial system are important contributing factors to the performance, stability and security of any economy, something which has been repeatedly demonstrated during times of financial crisis. While assessments of earlier financial crises tended to focus on shortcomings in the governance of financial sectors, not least...

Following the Global Financial Crisis of 2008–2009, there has been renewed interest in the diffusion and pluralization of financial ideas and practices, and in understanding how new ideas and practices can emerge to challenge the prevalence and diffusion of dominant ones. However, existing concepts and language in the broader literature on diffusio...

Debates on industrial policy have typically focused on interventions in the ‘real’ sector to facilitate the transformation of a resources-based economy to one that is based on manufacturing. Although the financial sector has always figured strongly in these discussions, its development, or rather repression, is almost always considered in the conte...

Vivid debates on the ethical foundations of contemporary financial practices followed the global financial crisis of 2007–8, with many questioning whether narrow self-interest and profit maximisation should serve as primary drivers of behaviour in finance. This coincides with a resurgent research interest in finance ethics that has investigated whe...

Whither the Asian Financial Systems post-Crisis? Analysing Economic Models Korea Malaysia Thailand Financial Systems in East Asia Epilogue: The East Asian Financial Sectors and the Global Financial Crisis

Malaysia's Khazanah Nasional, established in 1994, is one of the 20 largest sovereign wealth funds in the world. In the first decade of its existence, Khazanah had remained a relatively secretive organisation, sheltered by virtue of being wholly owned by the government and reporting directly to the prime minister who provided the organisation with...

While the global financial crisis (GFC) precipitated stagnation in the United States and throughout most of Europe, Asia escaped largely unscathed (and notably suffered less economic damage than during the Asian financial crises of a decade earlier). In this article, we examine how the GFC has affected Asian states' attitudes towards and participat...

The role of the state in the evolution of the financial systems has been significant in Korea and Malaysia as noted in the preceding chapters. The Korean state both owned and controlled banking institutions until at least the 1980s when they were privatised. Even so, the Korean state still intervened in, or at least influenced, the lending decision...

When key international financial institutions, such as Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, spectacularly collapsed during the global financial crisis of 2008–9, regulators began to review the role of the state in the financial system and to reconsider the continued viability of the ‘unfettered market’ approach to governing the financial sector, and...

Despite being the first casualty of the Asian financial crisis, and the focus of so much analysis and criticism, a couple of key weaknesses identified in the Thai financial system remain unaddressed. The Thai financial sector remains predominantly bank-based. Although the capital market has expanded and foreign participation in the banking sector h...

For many, the failure of the East Asian model of economic management was a primary contributing factor to the Asian financial crisis of the late-1990s. The crisis itself presented an opportunity to address these very weaknesses and the financial systems in East Asia were expected to converge onto a global norm, one that was underpinned by market dy...

Malaysia emerged from the financial crisis of 1997–8 relatively unscathed when compared with its regional neighbours Indonesia, Korea and Thailand.1 This was because local banks and corporations had far more restricted access to foreign borrowings than their counterparts in the other crisis economies (Chin and Jomo 2003). Capital market flows, on t...

Historical control of the financial system by the Korean government was considered by many as one of the most important, if not the most important, instrument employed in the country’s path to economic development (Nam and Lee 1995; Choi 1993). In regulating businesses’ access to credit, the government was able to direct and influence their decisio...

In the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis of 1997, many expected the crisis affected countries to reform and restructure their financial systems. In particular, in light of the criticisms about corruption, cronyism, and the weaknesses of the state-business nexus in East Asia, and given the nature of the contemporary global financial system, it...

Supervisor: Dr Ngaire Woods. Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Oxford, 2001. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 88-98).