THE IMPACT OF THE ASIAN ECONOMIC CRISIS ON WORK AND WELFARE IN VILLAGE

The crisis which hit the regions of East and Southeast Asia in 1997-98 gave rise to instantaneous and fierce debate. Differences in opinion focused in the first round on the causes of the sudden halt to the long-time boom that had led the economies on a trajectory of high growth rates and, in the second round, on the impact on levels of employment and welfare for the peoples involved. This study does not address the origins of that economic crisis but rather its effects on the work and wellbeing in the villages of my fieldwork on Java. The factual evidence presented demonstrates that, although the crisis caused major setbacks for the whole region, their scale and intensity differed considerably. From the beginning Indonesia has been singled out as the worst case. While some affected countries already showed signs of recovery in 1998, the most populous nation in Southeast Asia seemed to collapse into further chaos. As elsewhere, the downward slide began with depreciation of the national currency starting in autumn 1997. In contrast to Malaysia, Thailand and South Korea, for example, where inflation was brought under control and financial institutions were cleaned up, the monetary crisis in Indonesia deepened and triggered a political crisis. Suharto’s fall in May 1998 signalled the end of the New Order regime which had lasted for more than thre