The impact of the economic recession in the West has resulted in Far East Asian countries being severely hit by this economic plague and India to a lesser extent. The Western media has during the past few months been reporting of a large number of Chinese industries closing up resulting in the unemployment of millions of Chinese workers.

The tens of millions of Chinese workers who are migrants from the countryside to industrial centres when they go home to their villages for the Chinese New Year will not have their  jobs when thy come back, it has been reported. This is a country which recorded 13 percent GDP in 2007.

The main reason for the collapse of the East Asian economies is the fall of exports to Western markets -America and Europe. Chinese exports went down by 2.8 percent in December when compared to the previous year.

According to The Economist Japan's GDP had fallen by 10 percent, Singapore's by 17 percent and South Korea by 21 per cent.

Models of development

These East Asian countries were held up as models of economic development for the past three decades. Their economic strength lay in industrial exports to the West, cheap labour being their advantage. They were able to manufacture goods at comparatively cheaper prices than American and European industries and Western governments permitted the inflow of goods despite protests made by labour unions of the West.

Free trade and globalisation became watchwords of Western governments and their economies boomed along with the East Asian Tigers

Even though some of these countries now have sturdy economies and their citizens have the financial capacities to purchase goods at prices that were sold in the West, intra trade between the East Asian economies does not seem to have worked, some economists claiming that they were linked with trade relations to the West.

Rethinking

The thinking among some Asians seems to be that they were lured into globalisation by the prospects it held and led into opening up their economies and going for export-led growth to meet Western consumer demand. Now with the crash of Western markets these countries are stranded well and truly.

The argument forwarded by some economists is that the crash of East Asian economies is not necessarily because of the crash of export markets of the West but for weak domestic demand. China with a population of a billion people has a tremendous market for Chinese manufactured goods but China has failed to capitalise on this advantage.

Western economists blame policies of government for the week domestic demand.

The Economist says: 'after a decade ago, many countries fixed their broken financial systems but left their economies skewed towards exports. Savings remained high and domestic consumption was suppressed, partly out of the balance of payment pressures faced then, countries have run large trade surpluses and had built up huge foreign exchange reserves.'

On their own

Asian economies have now to fend for themselves because the West now in its agonies cannot come to their rescue even if they wished to. During the last Asian Economic crisis Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed spurned assistance from international monetary lending institutions and pulled his country out of the doldrums without foreign assistance.

Japan has done it before using its own resources while China with the second largest economy will undoubtedly adopting its own strategies.

The question which most Third World countries that have taken up to the panacea of export led development of their economies will be thinking about is the need to change their current economic strategies.