It was this financial dimension that made the Asian crisis so costly. And costly it certainly was. Per capita real GDP fell by about 9 per cent in east Asia excluding China and Japan. The fall in Indonesia was 15 per cent.
On the best available figures, non-performing loans (NPLs) reached nearly half of all loans in Indonesian and Thai banks, and NPL ratios reached double-digits in several other countries in the region. 5 The process of sorting out banking problems of this magnitude required, as it usually does, extensive public funding.