Banyan Now for the soft part The heyday of “factory Asia” may be ending sooner than anyone thought Oct 6th 2012 | from the print edition; The Economist PARK JAE-SANG has shown the way forward. The South Korean rapper, known as PSY, this week topped the pop charts in Britain and lay second in America. His gloriously inane video, “Gangnam Style” (with some 350m online viewings so far), has proved that Asia’s economic powerhouses can lead the world in exporting intangible goodies as well as things you can drop on your foot. Facing an alarming economic slowdown, much of Asia needs to learn the lesson: service industries are the future. That is a crude summary of the latest “Outlook” for the region published this week by the Asian Development Bank (ADB). For almost the entire region, it is far gloomier than the ADB’s previous forecast in April—if still startlingly perky by Western benchmarks. In Asia as a whole, excluding Japan, economic growth this...