A number of countries in the region, including China and Japan, have banking system assets exceeding 200 per cent of GDP – although some other countries, where financial deepening and liberalisation still has some way to run, have relatively smaller banking systems.
After being severely affected by the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, the region’s banking systems were fairly resilient to the more recent (global financial) crisis and are today well capitalised with sound asset performance. So the size of Asia’s financial system has grown substantially.