The government said the deficit in Japan's current account, the broadest measure of trade in goods and services, was a larger-than-expected 172.8 billion yen (1.8 billion dollars).

Japan has historically run a massive current account surplus but demand for the cars, high-tech goods and machinery that have propelled the Japanese boom has dried up in the face of the global downturn.

"Shocking," said Toshihiro Nagahama, a senior economist at Dai-ichi Life Research Institute in Japan.

"Because we can't expect that the US economy will hit a trough in the near term, Japan's exports will very likely remain very weak," he told Dow Jones Newswires.

It was Japan's first such deficit in 13 years and the news helped drive negative sentiment on equities markets across most of the region.

Japan's Nikkei stock index shed 1.21 percent to close at its lowest level since October 1982. The benchmark has dropped 20 percent so far in 2009, after a record 42 percent slump last year.

Around midday, Hong Kong was down 1.8 percent while Taipei closed off 0.55 percent. Seoul and Sydney bucked the trend, picking up 1.58 percent and 0.3 percent respectively.

The Asian Development Bank released a new study saying that Asia, apart from Japan, saw 9.6 trillion dollars wiped off the value of financial assets last year -- more than a year's worth of GDP.

"This is by far the most serious crisis to hit the world economy since the Great Depression," ADB president Haruhiko Kuroda said.

"While this crisis originated in the US and some European countries, by now no region or country is insulated," Kuroda said.

Kuroda said that while some countries in South Asia had less exposure to the crisis, they would still remain vulnerable since export earnings and dollar remittances were likely to soften. He did not name specific countries.

The ADB report estimated a total of 50 trillion dollars in capital losses around the world in 2008.

The top economic adviser to new US President Barack Obama said world leaders should focus on boosting demand ahead of next month's G20 summit in London.

"This notion that the economy is self-stabilising is usually right but it is wrong a few times a century," Lawrence Summers, who heads the White House's National Economic Council, told the Financial Times.

"And this is one of those times."

He called for "extraordinary public action" to address the crisis.

The International Monetary Fund called last week for governments around the world to enact further stimulus measures to counter the global slump.

"It is essential in our view that public sector authorities play their appropriate role in preventing a collapse of confidence in the private sector that might lead to a vicious downward spiral," it said.

Governments have tried with limited success to prod their economies in the face of what is being called the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

The United States in February launched a staggering 787-billion-dollar stimulus package, with nearly half the spending budgeted for the country's fiscal year 2010 that starts on October 1.

burs/ft

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