Thanks to the desire to eke out the maximum number of minutes possible for my holiday, combined with woeful planning, I recently ended up doing a return flight from Spain and an outbound to Singapore in the space of a few hours.

From a personal point of view, the mammoth journey enabled me to test whether gorging on complimentary snacks and the worst variations of reality TV is an effective antidote to window seat-induced joint ache. On a professional (and more useful) note, it offered the chance to compare one of Europe’s “old world” economies, back-to-back, with a fast-growing Asian equivalent.

Spain and Singapore are each beautiful, vibrant places. The former was a family vacation, the latter a work trip, and I am a big fan of both. Obviously (I hope!), our household doesn’t select holiday destinations based on the country’s attractiveness as an investment or its long-term drivers of economic health. That said, I found it impossible not to notice some stark contrasts.

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Whereas Spain is charming, Singapore is humming. It has a conspicuously young workforce. Offices and retail spaces are all ultra-modern, eco-friendly and kitted with smart technology. Unlike many parts of Europe, a flat, functional and fully built motorway is not some arcane treasure to be marvelled at; the infrastructure is efficient and everything is impeccably clean.

These disparities leapt into my mind during the conference I spoke at in Singapore. I was on a panel with a well-known academic from southeast Asia who made a couple of observations which, as a Brit, I instinctively bristled at — but also found difficult to debunk.

His first was that, if you’re looking for optimism, don’t speak to a young person in Europe. Gen Zers across Asia are benefiting from a long-term demographic shift. They are part of an increasing population with a growing middle class, where manufacturing dominance and tech innovation have underpinned a snowball effect of wealth creation.

In the past decade, GDP across Singapore, China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam has had an average 5 per cent compound annual growth rate. Conversely, the average across the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain is 1.5 per cent.

The contention that a slow-lane economy manifests as gloom about the future among its younger population is borne out in other data. In the UK, France and Spain, only about 20 per cent of adults believe that their children will be better off financially than they are. In Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia, this figure is close to 40 per cent.

The Asian academic’s second argument was that a major reason for Europe’s economic stagnation is the tendency of western governments to think about the future on a one to two-year time horizon. With electoral cycles of about four years, it is more challenging for western democracies to make decisions based on a multi-decade payoff. His point wasn’t to defend autocracies but simply to underscore that China and some other Asian economies can play a long game that would be politically unpalatable in the UK, Europe or the US.

This luxury enables many eastern governments to be guided by the principle of considering what will benefit living standards for future generations. A mindset trained on long-term goals limits fixation on short-term data misses such as GDP underperforming expectations, which become tolerable politically and economically. It has also led to sustained investment in modernising their economies, with an emphasis on digitising financial systems, fostering technological innovation and ensuring infrastructure remains up to date.

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This long-term approach is arguably paying off. Data from Morningstar Direct shows net assets in UK and European-focused funds down 15 per cent in the past five years, while those in Asia ex-Japan funds are up 13 per cent.

Boarding my flight back to the UK, I decided to forgo a second reality TV marathon and catch up on the news. The papers were full of the feelgood factor from the Paris Olympics, during which President Macron’s approval rating bounced alongside the French economy. A bit of optimism can, indeed, work wonders.

And, on the UK specifically, it made me consider — with Labour pledging to be the “party of growth”, is growth possible without optimism? If young people here are really as dejected about their prospects as my fellow panellist in Singapore posited, addressing this issue is not only a social but an economic imperative.

Pessimism discourages people from investing for the future and, potentially, persuades bright young talent entering the workforce that the grass is greener elsewhere. Which, on my next visit to Singapore, they might highlight as a typically gloomy thing for a Brit to say!

Seema Shah is chief global strategist at Principal Asset Management