While rising government debt is a growing concern in Europe and the United States,

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Asian economies remain remarkably resilient, even buoyant, underscoring the shifting of economic might from West to East.

China has been repaying some of what little foreign debt it owes, even as economists have wondered whether Greece would require an international bailout and asked how long the United States could sustain record budget deficits.

‘‘We took a pass on the economic crisis,’’ said Philip S. Carmichael, president of Asian operations at Haier, China’s biggest appliance maker.

Even the Asian economies that have shrunk during the recession, like those of Malaysia and Cambodia, escaped the worst ravages — with the notable exception of Japan, the first industrialized country in Asia. Because of the Asian financial crisis of 1997, many countries in the region have been more conservative about borrowing and spending over the past decade than Western nations, which went on a debt binge during the good times and continued to increase their borrowing during the recession to try to turn their economies around.

Many economists say countries have to spend during recessions, increasing deficits and debt. But investors and economists alike worry about the long-term effects ofmammothdebt on the vitality of Europe and theUnited States.The longer it takesWestern capitals to confront their overspending, the higher and more rapid Asia’s rise will be, many economists say.

Even though Asian stock markets fell last week, analysts say there is no obvious Asian equivalent to, say, Greece, which is facing the possibility of insolvency.

Investors see little risk of default among even heavily indebted countries like India and Japan.

Compared with Greece, ‘‘the threat of these two defaulting is nowhere close, and the reason is that, thanks to high domestic savings rates, their debt is almost all domestically financed,’’ said Kim Eng Tan, a sovereign debt analyst in the Singapore office of the American rating agency Standard & Poor’s.

In India, the government’s debt is around 80 percent of the gross domestic product, but it owes more than 90 percent of that money to its own citizens. Of the rest, a big chunk is held by agencies like the World Bank that are not likely to press for quick repayment.

‘‘If you sell bonds to your own citizens, and you do it in your own currency, you don’t have much of a problem,’’ said Ajay Kapur, the chief global strategist for Mirae Asset, a big South Korean financial services company.

China has been repaying some of its small external debt as it comes due, a luxury that a country with more than $2 trillion in foreign reserves can afford.

China showed a government budget surplus for the first 11 months of last year, but Western economists still expect a small deficit for the entire year because agencies tend to go on spending binges every December to avoid returning unspent money.

A few smaller Asian nations have had difficulties in the past year and a half.

But they have been hurt more often by political strains than by economic troubles.

Like Greece, Pakistan and Sri Lanka have relied heavily over the years on overseas borrowing. That started to dry up in late 2008, as fighting with insurgents in both countries began to scare off foreign lenders. Both ended up receiving assistance from the International Monetary Fund, and that has shored up their finances, at least for now.

Ratings for both Thailand and the Fiji Islands were downgraded last year because of civil unrest as well, although neither required I.M.F. assistance.

The Asian country hurt the most by the global financial crisis may have been Mongolia, where a steep but temporary decline in world copper prices prompted the government to obtain a $224 million I.M.F. loan in March.

Though the risk of a full-blown sovereign debt crisis in Asia may seem remote, economists say there are other reasons that investors and policymakers should be concerned about high deficits.

In India, the growing fiscal deficit — which reached 8 percent of G.D.P. last year, up from3.3 percent in 2008—could dampen growth by making it harder and more expensive for corporations and individuals to borrow money, said Ila Patniak, a senior fellow at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy in New Delhi.

India’s policy makers have signaled that they intend to pare the deficit by selling stakes in government-owned companies and reducing subsidies for fuel and fertilizers. Analysts point out that Indian governments have long promised those changes but have struggled to deliver them because of internal political pressures.

China, too, has internal conflicts—between rural and urban populations and between Beijing and the disparate governments in the provinces — that make fiscal policy more difficult.

Keith Bradsher reported from Hong Kong.