How the Asian financial crisis reshaped emerging markets

THE Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) that began 20 years ago this month had lingering effects well into 1998, casting a long shadow over many of the region's economies for several years. Since that time, the lessons of that crisis have played a critical role in broadly reshaping emerging markets, particularly in Asia but also around the world.

I was living in Asia during the height of the crisis and I saw the devastating effects it had on local economies. Countries such as Indonesia, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines were hit hard by massive depreciations of their currencies, rapidly magnifying their external vulnerabilities.

Now two decades on, several countries have worked hard to build up their resilience to external shocks. Many of today's policymakers that lived through the AFC and learned from it have…