Asia's economic challenges might just be getting tougher if an extended export malaise is any guide. "Without a revival in shipments, it is difficult to foresee a pickup in growth more broadly," HSBC's economists write in a new note to clients highlighting a big shift in export patterns. Asia ex-Japan shipments to the European Union and the US are rising fast, but those to China are sinking at their quickest since the global financial crisis. "That's a worrying finding: if the slowdown in China is enough to knock out Asia's trade engine despite the pickup in demand in the US and EU, the region has in a sense decoupled from the West … this goes right to the heart of the debate about whether the global slowdown in trade is a merely cyclical phenomenon, and thus temporary, or structural, and thus long term."
