The main purpose of this thesis is to summarize the theoretical approach to financial, economic, currency, and sovereign debt crises and create a common analytical framework. The analytical framework is then applied to make a comprehensive comparative analysis of the crises in Asian countries (South Korea, Japan, Thailand, and Singapore) during the East Asian crisis in 1997-1998 and the Great Recession in 2007-2008. The thesis includes research on liberalization and deregulation of the

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... sector prior to the crisis, which caused high-yield seeking capital flows to pour into the researched country. The flows tend to distort the domestic market and create imbalances, eventually ending in an oversupply of productive capacity, an extreme valuation of assets, and unsustainably high levels of debt. A wake-up call may trigger a set of events which start the financial and/or economic crisis within the country. Due to the globalized nature of financial markets, contagion may spill-over from the financial sector to the real economy, to other states within the region via financial or trading linkages, and eventually to other regions not directly intertwined with the region of the crisis' origin. The results show that the theoretical basis is very relevant for Thailand and Korea in 1997-8 and Singapore in 2007-8, where both a financial and an economic crisis loomed. Countries heavily intertwined both financially and economically with the region of origin of the crisis suffered the most. The damage to the country's economy depends on healthy fundamentals before the crisis, the strength of regulatory and oversight institutions, and the degree of interconnectedness. The speed of recovery depends on timely, concerted, and effective fiscal and monetary stimulus and reforms. The crisis in Asia in 1997 was a combined economic, financial, and currency crisis, bordering on a sovereign debt default crisis. The late 2000s recession in Asia was a relatively mild contagion-driven economic crisis hurting mainly the financial se [...]