“Thailand, Malaysia, South Korean suffered a terrible recession after the Asian financial crisis of 1997, but they were able to engineer a recovery by boosting local consumption.”. I don’t know about Thailand and Malaysia; but South Korean actually went through a consumer credit bubble. Basically, consumers are new to usign credit, and when the government encourages easy credit to stimulate consumption, consumers abused easy credit. There was a lot of bad consumer loans out there. I think that it wasn’t too bad because soon South Korean benefited tremendouly from trading with China.
I heard that Vietnam is doing very well, in fact, quite a few of my Chinese friends went there looking for investment opportunities.