The Evolution of Asia

Asia appears to be recovering from the global recession faster than the West. But the financial imbalances that triggered the worst economic crisis in memory could still put the brakes on the world's fastest-growing economies. So warns economist and Morgan Stanley Asia chairman Stephen Roach in his new book, The Next Asia, a collection of his essays and analysis from the past several years that foreshadowed the meltdown. The following is an exclusive excerpt from the book's introduction.

As the most dynamic and rapidly growing region in the world over the past decade, developing Asia has attained a new level of prosperity. From China to India, the region's per capita income has more than doubled since the wrenching Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. Since 1990, over 400 million fewer Asians are living in poverty on incomes of less than $2 per day. On the surface, the region has much to celebrate on the long and arduous road to economic development. Many believe the Asia Century is now at hand. (Read "Fortress Asia: Is a Powerful New Trade Bloc Forming?")

Such celebration may be premature. As 2008 came to an end, every economy in the region had either slowed sharply or tumbled into outright recession. Far from having the autonomous capacity to decouple from weakness elsewhere in the world, export-led developing Asia had become even more tightly tethered to foreign markets than was the case a decade earlier. The export share of panregional gross domestic product (GDP) hit a record 47% in 2007, fully 10 percentage points higher than the portion in the late 1990s. With approximately 50% of those exports earmarked for the rich countries of the developed world, a rare and sharp synchronous downturn in the U.S., Europe and Japan undermined an increasingly important source of Asia's seemingly invincible growth dynamic. Far from celebrating a newfound resilience, the region was reeling from a severe external shock. Like it or not, Asia's newfound ascendancy remains precarious.

Ironically, this very outcome was predicted by China's Premier, Wen Jiabao. In a statement following the conclusion of the National People's Congress in March 2007, Premier Wen acknowledged that the Chinese economy looked extremely strong on the surface, especially in terms of GDP and employment growth. Yet, beneath the surface, he cautioned, such strength was far more questionable. In the case of China, he warned of an economy that was increasingly "unbalanced, unstable, uncoordinated and unsustainable." Little did he realize at the time how those "four uns," as they were later to become known, would pose an immediate and tough challenge to China's growth imperatives. Nor did he or other Asian leaders appreciate the broader implications of those insights for the region as a whole.

In warning of the precarious state of the Chinese economy, Wen was expressing concerns about the nation's very risky macro bet. With nearly 80% of its GDP going to exports and fixed investment, China had become overly reliant on cross-border trade and on the investments required to support the logistics and capacity of its increasingly powerful export machine. Not only has China slowed dramatically — with export growth turning sharply negative in late 2008 and industrial output growth slipping into the low single digits — but the rest of an increasingly China-centric Asian economy has been quick to follow.

China's export dependency went far beyond the unbalanced structure of its real economy. Its financial and currency policies were also aimed at deriving maximum support from external demand. A closed capital account and an undervalued renminbi (RMB) were icing on the cake for China's powerful strain of export-led growth. Moreover, to the extent that its currency-management objectives required ongoing recycling of a massive reservoir of foreign-exchange reserves into U.S. dollar – based assets, such capital inflows helped keep longer-term U.S. interest rates at exceptionally low levels. In effect, China's implicit interest-rate subsidy ended up becoming an important prop to bubble-prone U.S. asset markets and, ultimately, for the asset-dependent American consumer.

The linkage between Asian growth and the American consumer bears special mention. The U.S. consumer is still the dominant consumer in the global economy. Although America accounts for only about 4.5% of the world's population, its consumers spent about $10 trillion in 2008. By contrast, although China and India collectively account for nearly 40% of the world's population, their combined consumption was only about $2.5 trillion in 2008. During the boom, China and the rest of Asia reaped enormous benefits from a mercantilist growth model that was tied increasingly to the voracious appetite of the American consumer. Unfortunately, Asia did not do a good job in hedging that bet. The U.S. could now be in the early stages of a multiyear consumption retrenchment, making the problems of an unbalanced, export-dependent Asian economy even more acute.

But that's not the only challenge that Asia faces. Significantly, Wen's warning was not just about the imbalances of an economic and financial structure that had become overly reliant on exports. By raising concerns over instability, he was also cautioning of the perils of overreliance on energy, industrial materials and base metals. In an era of booming global growth, the threat of the so-called commodity supercycle and its ever higher price structure was a crushing burden on resource-intensive developing nations. The Premier urged China to focus more on what he called a "scientific development" strategy that would be based on improved efficiencies of resource consumption. Similarly, by warning of a lack of coordination, Wen was highlighting the fragmentation of the Chinese system — not just its banks and companies but also a system of governance that was still heavily dominated by power blocs at the provincial and local level. And his concerns over sustainability were specifically aimed at pollution and environmental degradation — unmistakably negative externalities of China's fixation on open-ended, manufacturing-led economic growth. To the extent that the Chinese experience is a microcosm of the broader Asian development model, Wen's "four uns" are very much a blueprint of what it will take to realize the aspirations of the Asian Century. Just as the financial crisis of the late 1990s was a wake-up call for the region to put its financial house in order, the global crisis and recession of 2008-09 is a strong signal for Asia to refocus the basic structure of its economic-development model.

See pictures of the global financial crisis.