Development and Structural Change in Asia-Pacific

3	A tale of two crises
Latin America in the 1980s and the ‘HPAEs’ in the 1990s
John Weeks

Introduction

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’ ...