As income level rose with economic expansion, the number of middleincome households gradually increased, which underpinned the strong growth in consumption. As a result, the ground was laid for an autonomous expansion of domestic demand, which, along with exports, underlined Asian economic growth.
In many ways, these difficulties can be seen as the continuing after-effects of the financial crisis that gripped the North Atlantic economies in 2008. Australia, as with most of Asia, has to date been relatively shielded from the events in the North Atlantic countries.