Search

The objective of this paper is to survey the social consequences of the 1997 Asian financial crisis with the purpose of drawing policy lessons. The outbreak of the financial crisis and the ensuing increase in unemployment and poverty triggered a worsening of education and health outcomes. The situation stabilized and eventually improved only after governments and international organizations intervened. Employment creation and cash transfers programs played a positive role in maintaining income, while education and health care programs helped meet the population's vital education and health care needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to survey the social consequences of the 1997 Asian financial crisis with the purpose of drawing policy lessons. The outbreak of the financial crisis and the ensuing increase in unemployment and poverty triggered a worsening of education and health outcomes. The situation stabilized and eventually improved only after governments and international organizations intervened. Employment creation and cash transfers programs played a positive role in maintaining income, while education and health care programs helped meet the population's vital education and health care needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the performance of health care in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore. The activist role of the state in health care provision, at least partly established by the British in the colonial period, has enabled all three systems to combine low costs with high outcomes. Hong Kong is the largest spender on health care in terms of both U.S. dollar and percentage of GDP, followed by Singapore and Malaysia. The three countries' total health care expenditure is, in fact, lower than the 5 per cent of GDP recommended by the World Health Organisation for developing countries. Another notable feature is that private expenditures are either on par with, or often larger than, public expenditures in all three countries, again distancing them from high-income countries, where much health care expenditure is usually accounted for by the public sector. In the early 1990s per capita health care expenditure increased significantly in all three countries, though the increase was quite modest when placed in the context of their very high economic growth.