During the Mexican crisis in 1982, and the global crisis of sovereign emerging borrowers in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Soviet Union in the 1980s and early 1990s, as well as the Asian crisis at the end of the 1990s, emerging economies were exposed to sharp and abrupt financial crises calling for challenging macroeconomic adjustments of their domestic policies.
In the same period, the industrialised countries were protected from any such domestic crises. Substantial current account deficits were very easily financed, such that the external financial constraint did not materialise in those economies in any significant fashion in the period under review.