タイ金融構造分析 : 重化学工業化から通貨危機へ

抄録

Much literature exists concerning the causes for the Asian financial crisis, organized around the axes of actual and apparent reasons. However most of these causal analyses are flawed by being based on the very assumptions about policy approaches which they are attempting to justify. In this paper, aside from the suitability of policy approaches, we analyze the root causes of the financial crisis by examining what form of linkage existed between the flow of international short term funds and the Thai financial system, and establish how this brought about the process from economic bubble to financial crisis. The main findings of our analysis are as follows. First, the main causes of the real estate bubble were speculative investment by foreign investors via non-resident baht accounts and speculative financing by finance companies which were subsidiaries of local commercial banks. Second, the intensive inflow of foreign short-term capital clearly contributed to heavy industrialization and rapidly transformed domestic financial markets. Therefore, the Bank of Thailand (BOT) could not quickly impose an effective credit squeeze. Consequently, the financial system changed to one where financial institutions had huge amounts of bad debt, and a liquidity crisis arose from the rapid flight of huge foreign short-term capital when the bubble economy burst. The structural change itself was the essential cause of the currency crisis in Thailand. Finally, one of the main reasons why the crisis became so serious was that BOT could not manage the exchange rate policy on the basis of the correct information about the international financial situation due to the deterioration of internal communication after the bubble burst. Through our analysis we show that the reactions of the domestic entities played an important role indeed in both the development phase and the crisis one, although international factors and path-dependency in the Thai financial system heavily affected the domestic economy.