The fundamental question raised in this paper was to answer whether the so called East Asian growth mechanism that had been considered to have explained the growth of ASEAN quite well before the Asian economic crisis, can still have the explanatory power after the crisis and the subsequent economic restructuring. We first looked at various characteristics of East Asian growth mechanism, within the contexts of both internal (in which neo-classical, developmental state. and FDI-led variants were examined) and external models. We then tried to investigate the possible clues of East Asian growth mechanism, which may have contributed to the outbreak of the Asian economic crisis of 1977. One of the lessons we learned from this analysis was that ASEAN economies should lower their dependency upon external economies and watch external sources of distortion more carefully. However, we paid a deeper attention to internal or structural sources of the problem, particularly those of the financial sector. This was carried out by examining the nature and problems of economic restructuring in these economies after the crisis. Finally, we tried to anticipate some future prospects of East Asian growth mechanism in ASEAN which is still in the midst of its restructuring process. We found that East Asian growth mechanism may still be useful in the future growth of ASEAN. But we also noted that the mechanism should be reconstructed in the following two important ways. First, the mechanism should pay a closer attention and incorporate external cooperation as well as internal restructuring of the financial sector of these economies. Second, the role of government in the mechanism should he changed from that of the manager to that of the manager plus umpire for ASEAN.