Emerging market economies need to urgently think of ways and means to keep their growth rate up in order to cushion themselves against the harsh effects of the economic slowdown in the euro zone and the United States, a senior World Bank official said on Tuesday.

Kaushik Basu, Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank, told economists, academics, company executives and journalists in Johannesburg that in the global world a financial crisis in one country affects another country.

"No matter how bad the global situation is, emerging markets must strive to do better," Basu said when delivering a lecture on emerging market economies in a changing world at the University of Witwatersrand Business School in Johannesburg.

"The struggle has to go on not only in pure economics, but also on the political economy to make the society better so that people have a better chance," he said.

Basu said the U.S. economic slowdown and the euro zone financial crisis has partly been responsible for reduced growth rate in countries like India, South Africa and Japan among others.

"Connectivity of the world economies has meant that even emerging markets have been affected by the economic meltdown in the euro zone and U.S.," he said.

"The financial bailout given to European banks at the height of the financial crisis in 2011 managed to avert that turmoil but the real economy of the world remains in crisis," he added.

He urged emerging market economies to find innovative ways of dealing with challenges of globalization, noting that global recovery is likely to remain slow and stagnant until 2015.

He praised emerging economies for trading much more with each other, saying this was giving them some resilience against the global economic smelt-down.

Basu also challenged growing economies to help their unbanked citizens to participate in the economic growth by encouraging them to put their money into the formal financial system.

The official believed a single world currency will go a long way in dealing with the current financial crisis.

"Despite difficulties in Europe, I personally believe that the world has to move towards a monetary union where clusters of certain countries share the same currency," he said.

"Globalization has meant that boundaries between countries in terms of movements of goods and capital have dropped off. This means the global economy is increasingly becoming like a single economy and that creates a need for a single currency for easy control," Basu said.

Basu is also convinced that the proposed BRICS development bank will go a long way in covering the lending space which the current financial institutions are not occupying due to the increased demand for funding.