Beyond the 2008 Global Financial Crisis

This chapter reports activities after 2010, a timeline regarded as the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis which was formally announced to be over at the end of 2009 (Kehoe 2010; OECD 2010). Although some European countries were still in sovereign debt trouble after 2010 (Greece requested another bailout in early 2012 and Spain asked for external financial assistance in June 2012), we use 2010 as a cutoff point in order to be consistent with the reports of other country clusters in this booklet series. From the statistics introduced in Chapter 3, situations of these four economies in 2010 have clear rebounds under the support of each individual economy’s stimulus efforts and the gradual revival of global demands. As of mid-2012, the Asian economy as a whole has recovered from the financial crisis. The chief of the Asian Development Bank said, “The global economic slowdown will affect Asia this year (2012) but the region will remain the economic powerhouse of the world, led by China, India and Indonesia…regional and domestic demand in Asia are still fairly robust” (Kuroda 2012). At the same time, the IMF was gloomy about the world economy and cut its forecast for global economic growth for 2012 to 3.3 % from 4 %, because of the likelihood of a mild recession in Europe (Kuroda 2012). Affected by European market slowdown—China’s major export destination, there was a prediction that China’s growth would slip to 8.4 % in 2012 (Debnath 2012). However, Asia’s economic development relies on China more and more as it has become the top export destination for many of its neighbors, such as the other three economies reported in this volume. In what follows, in the sequence of China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan, we briefly describe what had happened in each individual economy after 2010 with some prior reasons.