Forecasts for world economic growth in 1998 have systematically been scaled down from a rather ambitious 4 per cent made towards the end of last year to only about 2 per cent at this stage. In a number of East Asian economies, growth will indeed be negative this year.
Secondly, the restructuring of the banking systems in a number of the affected countries will take some time before normality will be restored. As is known, the Japanese Government has just recently provided an amount of more than Yen 60 trillion to recapitalise the  BIS Review 89/1998  -4-  Japanese banking system.