Asia's Boom, Bust and Beyond by Mark L. Clifford and Pete Engardio. Prentice Hall Press, New York. From Financial Crisis to the New Millennium by Stephen Vines. Orion Business Books, London.
Recent headlines offer some clues.
In Malaysia this month, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's government charged two opposition politicians, a newspaper editor and the owner of a printing company under the country's draconian sedition law. A few days earlier, International Business Machines said it would increase its use of Linux and form a team of 200 programmers in the United States and India to fiddle with the free computer-operating system. Making sense of the Asian crisis has been an enormously difficult task. Making sense of the outlook for the next 10 years is even harder. That Malaysia's sedition law is still in force suggests that neither the world nor Asia have changed much.