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A crisis economist
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Dr Khor Hoe Ee has been a career economist with the IMF, MAS and in recent years, Amro – the Asean Plus Three Macroeconomic Research Office that he helped to set up.
ST PHOTO: GIN TAY
Soon after he joined the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1981, Dr Khor Hoe Ee had his first taste of crisis. He was assigned to the divisions that covered the East Caribbean, Dominican Republic and Mexico, and IMF found itself tackling a humanitarian disaster as a hurricane hit Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, devastating the economy. Then the Latin American debt crisis blew up, triggered by Mexico’s announcement that it was unable to pay its foreign debt.
After that, Dr Khor found himself unexpectedly posted to China in 1991-93 as IMF opened its first resident representative office there. China’s foreign reserves then were a mere US$20 billion or so, and coming after the Tiananmen Square incident which put China in international isolation for a while, notable Chinese leaders such as Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji were only too happy to grant access to IMF staff like him.
