Crisis marks beginning of end for Asian growth model

BEIJING (Reuters) - The deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression is likely to do more than years of international prodding to wean China and its Asian neighbors off their export-led model of economic growth.

Washington's $700 billion mortgage bailout will reshape the U.S. financial industry, perhaps for a generation or two, in ways that are not yet clear. The fallout for the rest of the world will be far-reaching.

But for Asia, one consequence of the turmoil is already inescapable. After living beyond its means for many years, America will have to rebuild its savings, so consumption will fall. Exports to the United States from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and now South Korea are already weakening.

The need to take up the slack is urgent.

"I think this is a wake-up call for China," said Stephen Roach, the chairman of Morgan Stanley in Asia.

Roach expects U.S. growth to slow from an average of 3.2 percent over the past 13 years to no more than 2 percent over the next two to three years. Consumption growth is likely to halve to around 2 percent as debt burdens are pared back.

As economic weakness spreads to Europe and Japan, the hit to China's exports could cut its growth rate from around 10 percent now -- already down from 11.9 percent in 2007 -- to about 8 percent, in Roach's view.

"It just underscores the fact that when you have a vibrant but very large export sector, when you have an external shock and you don't have a lot of dynamism on the internal demand side, you have greater risks to growth," he said at the weekend during a meeting of the World Economic Forum in Tianjin, northern China.

POLICY CRANKS UP

Central banks in the region are already responding. Taiwan, China, Australia and New Zealand have all cut interest rates.

Easing monetary policy is all well and good, especially as inflationary risks are receding. Many countries can also afford to resort to fiscal stimulus.

But stoking domestic demand also requires long-haul reforms that sometimes shake the very foundations of an economy -- such as scrapping deterrents to foreign investment in Japan, ending protection for favored groups in Malaysia or subjecting dominant firms to more competition in the Philippines and Hong Kong.

These are politically arduous tasks at the best of times. That's why economists wanted governments to get cracking on them while the going was good.

Countries instead largely shirked the challenge, content to rely on export-led growth by holding down their exchange rates.

Quite apart from hindering the needed rebalancing of the global economy, an undervalued currency acts as a tax on domestic demand, Hong Liang and Yu Song, economists who follow China for Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong, noted in a report.

The result is evident in the case of China, where household consumption last year came to just 35.3 percent of gross domestic product -- an unprecedented low in peacetime for a major country.

This means that a lopsided economy has scant domestic demand to fall back on as the global downturn deepens. "The real costs of China's resistance to yuan appreciation are now becoming more apparent," Liang and Song wrote.

DON'T SHUN INNOVATION

So what is to be done?

In the case of China, people need to be cajoled into saving less. To give consumers confidence to spend, Beijing must provide affordable health care and education and beef up its flimsy pensions system. But setting up the administrative structures to ensure extra public money is well spent takes time.

"My worry is that there are a lot of things that China can do to boost domestic consumption, including on the fiscal side, but none of these things are going to happen very quickly," said Michael Pettis, a professor of finance at Peking University.

"History shows that the shift from export- to domestic demand-led growth is long and often difficult," Pettis said. "It's very hard to see what you can do to force the shift in the next year."

For the region more broadly, a precondition of stronger domestic demand is a more efficient financial system. For too long, Asia has in effect contracted out to Wall Street the job of managing its excess savings.

If Asia's surpluses now shrink and it keeps more money at home, the region will have to deepen its bond markets at last and, ironically, promote more financial innovation so capital can be invested productively.

With complex, new-fangled debt instruments now discredited, making the case for financial liberalization will be tough.

Regulators in Asia will now be extremely cautious about approving any new forms of securitization, said James Seward, a financial sector specialist at the World Bank.

"No one would advocate that sub-prime types of securities be introduced in the markets, but the concern is that all new or emerging products will be stopped," he wrote on a Bank blog.

Pettis said it would be wrong to conclude from the crisis that the Anglo-Saxon financial model of sophisticated markets was just too risky. Asia needed to remember that Japan, with a system dominated by banks, suffered a deep crisis just a decade ago.

"The right lesson, I suspect, is that any type of financial system that has experienced very rapid monetary growth for a long period of time becomes increasingly over-extended and increasingly vulnerable," he said.

(Additional reporting by Jason Subler; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)