Though she probably won't do so well next time, she could still prevail thanks to her personal popularity and a recent spurt in GDP growth (despite some spillover from the East Asian financial crisis).

CNN: THE ROAD OF NO RETURN

Secondly, there are genuine fears that the rapid development of world financial markets, which have become truly global rather than national in the last decade, have the potential to destabilise not just the East Asian economies, as they did in the l997-98 financial crisis, but also the world's biggest economies as well.

BBC: The Lessons of Prague

One is that capital could suddenly flow out, as it did from other East Asian countries during the financial crisis a decade ago and Vietnam this year.

ECONOMIST: Capital inflows to China

The financial upsets of the past two decades, and especially the East Asian crisis of the late 1990s, have yielded a mass of new information and spurred a great deal of activity under each of these headings.

ECONOMIST: Hot and cold running money | The

Even before the financial crisis, household spending had seen the weakest growth rate among the East Asian tigers.

ECONOMIST: The ugliest economy of them all?

The saving surplus in East and South-East Asia is the legacy of a bust both more recent and more spectacular than the 1970s oil shocks: the Asian financial crisis in 1997-98.

ECONOMIST: Why oil exporters and East Asians are reluctant to spend