"Over the past 25 years, significant levels of public debt and external finance are more likely to have enhanced macroeconomic vulnerability than economic growth in developing countries. This applies not just to countries with a history of high inflation and past default, but also to those in...

The region has been transformed by these developments, changing from a set of countries that rapidly integrated with the world to one that is also aggressively exploiting the sources of dynamism that lie within Asia. But countries in East Asia now face the domestic side-effects of rapid growth...