Green shoots, but recovery slow: study

“While the outlook remains cautious, there is a sense of hope and openness to change in the post-crisis climate,” said Dennis Nally, chairman of PricewaterhouseCoopers International, which conducted the survey between August and the early part of this month together with the APEC CEO summit organizers.

Its findings are broadly in line with comments earlier this week from APEC foreign and trade ministers, who stated that while a recovery is underway, the financial crisis is far from over. The survey said that stimulus measures aided recovery, with the three largest economies in APEC — namely China, Japan and the United States — committed to spend, in aggregate, US$1.5 trillion. Asian economies in particular, such as China, Singapore and South Korea, have seen a faster pace of improvement.

One possible reason for the swifter recovery is that Asian finances were in a stronger position before the crisis.

Philip Ng, chief executive of Far East Organization and one of 24 business leaders interviewed in detail for the survey, said: “The crisis of 1997 prepared us well for this recession. The recession has impacted all of us, for sure. The Asian financial crisis changed the world of our business. It made us more cognizant of the risk of gearing and the use of foreign currencies. The crisis did not have the same currency shocks. Neither did we see a spike of interest rates.”

But while economies are slowly coming to life, it is not a rosy future as the survey stated: “Global recovery is uneven and unemployment is expected to remain high in advanced economies.”

While 28 percent overall strongly agreed, or agreed, that unemployment would return to pre-crisis levels within the year, the figure was only 20.6 percent in the Americas — Canada, Chile, Mexico, Peru and the U.S.

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