James Seward's blog

The crisis certainly hit China hard, but the spillover to banks has been minimal thus far. Photo courtesy of randylane under a Creative Commons license.

The story of the current financial crisis is well-known now and much has been written.  Indeed, we’re now at the point where many observers are indicating that the crisis is now at an end.  It would seem that the immediate financial sector impacts are leveling off, but in many countries the economic recovery will likely take a long time.  However, a number of emerging markets have come out of the crisis in relatively stable shape.  China is the most prominent example.  In fact, one might say that China is having a “good crisis” in certain ways as it has lifted its prominence – it is the one large country seen as leading the world out of this global crisis.  The same applies for China’s financial system given that many of its banks are now the largest in the world and (at least on the surface) posting strong performance. 

Given that Asia is now widely seen as leading the world out of the crisis, it is fitting that the role of Asia was more prominently recognized in the global economic system in the recent G20 meeting held in Pittsburgh.  Since we last looked in July, the outlook for the emerging markets of East Asia has continued to brighten.  The latest regional forecasts come from the Asian Development Bank in its Asian Development Outlook (pdf) published last week.  It points to “the rapid turnaround in [Asia’s] largest, less export-dependent economies” and predicts that “the regional economy is now poised to achieve a V-shaped rebound.”  These are very positive words indeed!  As the graph below shows, the ADB has in fact upgraded its growth forecasts for a number of economies for 2009.

Although the signs are pointing upwards, performance is still mixed in a number of key areas.

As mentioned in the last blog post, capital flows have dropped off significantly across Asia. The decreasing capital flows, from foreign direct investment to bank credit, appears to be an additional drag (along with sharp declines in exports and industrial production) on economic growth and recovery. So, is there some potential for a regional solution to deal with this crisis-related phenomenon?

According to the Institute of International Finance, the peak inflow of private capital was $296 billion in 2007, which shrunk 77% to $59 billion last year. The expected inflows will rise to $88 billion in 2009, but this still only amounts to 30% of the peak. The decline was led by a rapid contraction in private credit from banks, which moved from $167 billion in 2007 to negative $3 billion in 2008, and to negative $27 billion by the end of this year. This large shift is attributable to foreign (i.e., US and European) banks pulling back from Asia in order to shore-up their own financial health, including reducing leverage and bolstering capital levels.

This is the latest installment of the regional round-up and it has been a while.  However, there has not been much groundbreaking news related to the financial crisis to report, with a few exceptions (more to come later). 

As mentioned in my last post, I was in Asia just a few weeks ago, and one (favorite) destination was Beijing. One key reason for being there was to participate in a seminar on “Promoting Innovation for Development” with the Ministry of Science and Technology. This seminar covered a range of topics related to innovation, including China’s strategies for innovation, strengthening the capacities of small- and medium-sized enterprises to innovate, and the financing of innovation. The seminar was well-attended by a range of participants, including the financial regulatory agencies, and the seminar served as a platform to launch a new book the World Bank published entitled, “Promoting Enterprise-Led Innovation in China.” Please take a look!

I attended the seminar to discuss strengthening the ecosystem for domestic venture capital in China (a pdf of my presentation can be downloaded after the jump). This presentation covered the basics of the venture capital (VC) industry, what is happening in China, the challenges and recommendations for improvement of the ecosystem for VC in China and the areas for further research.

I apologize for the lack of recent posts, but I have been traveling in the region and then getting over a cold, so I’m finally back in action.  One of the stops during the trip last month was to Jakarta to participate in our internal Economist’s Forum.  This forum was very interesting and included sessions with the Indonesian Minister of Finance, as well as the Minister of Trade.  The session that I participated in was focused on the implications of the current global economic crisis and the impacts on East Asian financial sectors.  This was a good opportunity to consolidate our own thoughts on the subject and to lay out the basic issues as we see them today (I’ve attached the presentation, which comes with the required caveat that these are not official World Bank views, but instead my personal views). 

This presentation starts by running through what we know, what we can expect to know and how we know what we know, and why it is so hard to know anything in the area of corporate and financial sectors.  We then move into how we see the crisis coming to Asia, the impact on corporations, the spillover to the financial sector, the policy responses to the crisis to date, and finally what the World Bank is doing.  We begin by admitting that it is difficult to do accurate corporate and financial sector analysis for a wide range of reasons, ranging from problems with reporting and disclosure to weaknesses in regulatory standards and financial supervision practices.  Despite this constraint, we can see some general regional trends... 

We are finally starting to see some positive news around the East Asia and Pacific region, but it is too soon to begin to speak of "green shoots" of economic activity or reaching the bottom of the economic downturn in Asia. Although the Swine flu (one disease originating from animals that did not come from Asia!) and the nervousness about the condition of U.S. banks had a slightly negative impact on financial markets in Asia this past week, the stock markets are still up by about 12% for the year – led by Indonesia (21.6%), Korea (11.8%), and China (9.4%).

In terms of big newsworthy events in Asia, one of the biggest has to be the anti-government protests in Thailand. A relatively small number of protesters dramatically caused the cancellation of an ASEAN+3 meeting held in Pattaya this past weekend where 10 regional heads of state were evacuated. The World Bank President, as well as the head of the IMF and UN, were turned around at the airport in Bangkok. Although the protests around the country have effectively ended after martial law was declared and two protesters died, the damage of this may be longer-lasting. Although a discussion of the politics would be interesting, let's concentrate on the finance-related issues.

I'm sorry it has been a while since the last East Asia & Pacific regional roundup. A lot has happened, so let's get right to it. As usual, the downward trends continue across the region. The Asian Development Bank just came out with their Development Outlook report and their growth forecasts for this year for emerging markets are bleak – only 2.3% growth in Southeast Asia and 4.7% for the region. The average is pulled up by China, where ADB's estimate for growth is 7%, which is slightly above the World Bank's forecast of 6.5% for China.

The rate of change is dramatic since 2007 when the regional average growth rate was and average of 8%. The countries most dependent on exports were hit the hardest, such as Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Korea, and China. Speaking of which to give the latest examples include Korea, where exports declined by 21% in March, but the good news was that this drop was less than the 26% decline in the first two months of the year. Korea also experienced a 10.3% decline in industrial output in February.

There has been a noticeable lack of entries to the East Asia & Pacific finance blog recently, but unfortunately I've been otherwise occupied on a trip in Beijing. It has certainly been a busy time here in China's capital with the National People's Congress (NPC) going on. However, I haven't seen much of it other than the long traffic jams caused by the road closures. The NPC meetings covered some of the domestic economic stimulus plans, but it has not dealt directly with financial sector issues. Maybe it did not need to since the banks here have already responded to the stimulus.

A recent China Daily report had a great graphic that showed the recent boom in lending by the banking sector, which corresponds very nicely to the announcement of the original economic stimulus plan. As I highlighted in a prior blog post, the $586 billion economic stimulus plan announced in November was only 30 percent funded from the central government, and the expectation was that much of the rest was to come from state-owned banks. Well, it seems they have delivered with gusto!