By Orla Ryan BBC News Online business staff

Cast your mind back five years and the focus of economists was not on Argentina or Brazil, but Asia.

Workers protested on the streets of Jakarta and Manila, not Buenos Aires. Television pundits spoke of contagion, ripple effects, and crises afflicting Asia's tiger economies, not Latin America.

The restructuring has been excruciating

Vasan Shridharan, economist HSBC Singapore

The vocabulary of economic crisis appears to have become even more hackneyed and overused in the intervening five years.

But when the government of Thailand devalued its currency, the baht, on 2 July 1997, its effect was real and immediate.

Hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs - many have still to be regained - local currencies plunged in value and businesses shut down.

First quarter GDP

South Korea: 5.7% Thailand: 3.9% Indonesia: 2.5% Taiwan: 0.9% Singapore: -1.7% China: 7.6% Malaysia: 1.1% Philippines: 3.8% Percentage change on year earlier Source: Economist

The 'managed float' was one of the first of a series of events that together became known as the Asian economic crisis.

Five years on, many of these economies are growing again, in part because their cheaper currencies made their exports more competitive.

In countries throughout the region - led by South Korea - domestic demand is picking up, reducing the reliance on exports.

But the effects of the crisis are still felt, with many businesses and governments behaving very differently to how they did in 1997.

Where it began

During the 1990s, foreign investment had been pouring into Thailand, attracted by cheap labour for assembly plants.

Bangkok was growing, stoking a property and stock market boom, which was largely financed by money borrowed in US dollars.

These workers at Hyundai feared job losses

But the size of the country's current account deficit led many to believe the currency was overvalued, encouraging investors to quickly swap any Thai baht earned back into dollars.

Speculators moved in and with few reserves to defend its currency, the Thai authorities gave in and allowed the currency to plummet.

Speculators began to move from one currency to the next.

The crisis moved quickly and within months the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had to provide bail-outs for Thailand, South Korea and Indonesia.

The IMF money came with conditions, aimed at shaking new life into corporate Asia, new rigour into its economic management

The crisis did expose several fault lines running through Asian economies - namely a reliance on short term debt, burgeoning current account deficits, poor corporate legislation, an unwieldy and inefficient banking sector.

And it was these problems that the IMF wanted the region to address.

Unmasking a crisis

Falling currencies meant that many companies found themselves unable to pay their dollar debts, increasing the weight of bad debts that the region's banks were already saddled with.

"Many of the companies that looked to be fundamentally strong were unmasked by the Asian crisis," Vasan Shridharan, economist at HSBC Singapore said.

The restructuring required "has been excruciating", he added.

Much of Asian business life appears to have been a complicated web of relationships, not just with creditors and clients, but also within the families that ran the business. Many were reluctant to bring outsiders in.

In any crisis, it is hard to see any clear winner. Everyone feels very much the loser

Claudio Piron, Standard Chartered

"We have [since the crisis] also seen second and third generation families, thinking that for the long term success of the company, we need to consider flotation... bringing in other investors," Standard Chartered's head of foreign exchange strategy Claudio Piron said.

In some countries the change has been more dramatic than others.

An estimated 34% of the South Korean equity market is owned by foreigners, Piron points out.

"Before the crisis, there were 30 chaebol [huge conglomerates], now there are about 16. They had 2,100 financial institutions, now there are 1,600... crazy numbers," Piron said.

Many people were angered by the intervention of international agencies

Pradumna Rana, director of the Asian Development Bank's regional economic monitoring unit in Manila agrees that "the economic and financial landscape in east Asia five years after the crisis is quite different".

Degrees of change

But while reforms and new legislation - such as bankruptcy laws - have been introduced, the actual practice of change has proved harder.

The fear of further change is linked by many to fear of greater poverty - as restructuring often leads to job losses.

HSBC's Vasan Shridharan points out that - with the exception of South Korea - the region's unemployment rate is higher than the average for the previous 10 years.

Even in South Korea, where the recovery has been strongest, there is "a degree of disappointment that a lot of foreign companies and banks bought in at the lows", Standard Chartered's Claudio Piron said.

"A lot of foreign investors are sitting on substantial gains. A lot of Koreans are saying we have borne all the hardship and yet the foreigners have gained."

His view is that "both [sides] are unhappy with the deal they got.

"In any crisis, it is hard to see any clear winner. Everyone feels very much the loser."

The handling of the crisis has prompted a rethinking of the role of international agencies that is still ongoing.

"There has been a lot of soul searching since then, particularly with Indonesia, the whole crisis plunged a third of the population into poverty," Mr Piron said.

The ADB's Pradumna Rana voices cautious optimism.

These countries "have built up a cushion to prevent future crises, the current account is relatively comfortable, reserve levels are fairly high in the region.

"In a globalising world, we don't know [ where the next shocks could come from] the shocks could be good as well as bad."