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India is handing out raises to four million public servants. Japan is distributing cash payments to households. China is giving tax breaks on purchases of cellphones and washing machines. Everyone is cutting interest rates at a clip not seen for years.

With their exports faltering and investment going soft, Asian countries are counting on consumers to save the day. In the past few weeks, governments have used every trick in the book to persuade them to head out shopping.

There is one problem: Asians are the world's most-dedicated savers. Thrifty at the best of times, they are doubly reluctant to spend now that hard times are coming and their wages and jobs are at risk.

Persuading them to open their wallets is one of the toughest challenges Asian governments face as the economic crisis deepens.

Asian economies are sliding into deep water faster than anyone expected. China's exports, the engine of its economy, fell for the first time in seven years in November. Japan announced a battery of new stimulus measures on Friday to battle its worsening recession. The growing threat of deflation has made Asian governments' job even harder. China's consumer price inflation hit its lowest level in two years in November. In Japan, the region's biggest economy, some economists are predicting that prices will start to fall in the new year.

Once deflation sets in, consumers tend to delay purchases in hope of finding lower prices later. In such a grim atmosphere, "I don't think they can persuade anybody to spend," said Chen Zhao, chief global strategist for Montreal's BCA Research. "Right now consumers are saving even more because they are frightened."

Governments in North America face the same problem, but Asians' famous thrift makes it all the harder for their leaders. High savings rates have been a hallmark of Asia's economic development, helping the region's tiger economies finance investment and growth. Now they have come to be seen as a handicap as Asian countries try to shift from a model that relies on foreign consumption of their goods to one that relies more on domestic demand.

The problem is especially acute in China, home of Asia's second-biggest economy. Because of the one-child policy, Chinese can no longer count on their children to support them in their old age. Pensions and health care funding are miserly, so they can't count on the government either.

In Canada, said Mr. Chen, "If I get laid off, I get UI [EI]. If I get sick, the government will take care of me." In China, "They have to take care of themselves. It's a pure form of raw capitalism. People have to save in order to afford being sick, to afford sending their kids to school - all of this comes from their private savings."

Partly as a result, consumer spending accounts for just 35 per cent of gross domestic product, compared with about 70 per cent in the United States. The Communist government in Beijing is determined to raise that figure.

Along with heavy spending on roads, bridges and other infrastructure projects, Beijing's more than $700-billion stimulus package includes an array of measures to pry open consumer wallets. On the weekend, China announced it aims to increase its money supply by 17 per cent in 2009 and encourage lending to boost domestic consumption and buoy growth in the world's fourth-largest economy.

Earlier this month, China announced a dramatic interest-rate reduction of one percentage point, the latest in a series of cuts. It has also moved to hand more property rights to farmers, giving them the ability to borrow against their land to finance purchases.

But will any of it work?

"There is a certain irony in looking to historically cautious Chinese consumers to increase spending at precisely the time that the horrific results of Western consumers not saving for a rainy day are all too clear," China scholar Colin Speakman wrote in a recent article for the state-run China Daily.

Hugo Restall, editor of the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review, argues that efforts to encourage spending during a downturn run up against what the British economist John Maynard Keynes called the paradox of thrift.

"Everyone tightens their belts in a crisis, even though they may know that collectively this will lead to economic disaster," Mr. Restall writes. "Therefore the government spending would have to be very big indeed to make a difference. People who were saving very little (Americans) will naturally increase their saving rate. But those who were already saving a lot (Asians) are unlikely to loosen their purse strings."

Not every Asian country has a high savings rate. Japan's rate has fallen to 3 per cent last year from 11 per cent in 1998, partly because, as the population ages, older Japanese are drawing down their savings to make it through a rough retirement.

Over the weekend, South Korea, Japan and China agreed to set up regular meetings to consult on issues facing the regional economy and work more closely to help counter challenges stemming from the global financial turmoil.