Europe turned to Asia and the Middle East for help yesterday as the financial crisis threatened to overwhelm Hungary and other ailing economies.

After talks with other Western leaders, Gordon Brown urged China and the oil-rich Gulf states to come up with hundreds of billions of dollars to aid countries struggling to survive.

Any help from the East is likely to come at a high price. China, Japan and the Gulf states are demanding more say in the way that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are run. Both organisations are dominated by America and Europe.

Mr Brown urged countries with big foreign exchange reserves to replenish the coffers of the IMF to facilitate loans to countries such as Iceland, Ukraine and Hungary. Many other ailing nations are expected to seek emergency aid.

The Prime Minister and other European leaders believe that the IMF’s current $250 billion (£157 billion) bail-out fund will be insufficient to tackle the crisis emerging in many countries, which makes the untapped reserves of the East so attractive. China, for example, has foreign exchange reserves of $1.9 trillion, compared with $213 billion for the eurozone as a whole.

Mr Brown said that he would raise the issue during a four-day trip to the Gulf starting on Saturday, when he will visit the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, which have all had multibillion-dollar boosts to their income from oil because of the recent price spike. He also plans to speak by phone with Wen Jiabao, the Prime Minister of China, which is sitting on a large capital reserve after a decade of expanding exports of consumer goods to the West.

Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, will argue tonight at the Mais Lecture that the emergence of a “new economic world order” shows the need for a new approach to maintain the stability of economies and financial markets.

Mr Brown said that in recent days that he had spoken with Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF managing director, President Sarkozy of France and Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, about his proposals, and that they were looking at similar ideas. He has also spoken to Ferenc Gyurcsany, the Hungarian Prime Minister.

“We have seen in recent days the financial crisis spreading to other countries – middle-income countries, Eastern European countries. Capital flight has made a number of countries potential victims of this crisis. So in the last few days I have discussed the risk of contagion and the need to stabilise economies right across Eastern Europe,” Mr Brown said.

The IMF has an arrangement known as the general agreement to borrow, under which countries with large reserves of cash make sums available to lend to states in financial difficulties. The fund has recently said that it has $250 billion available for use, Mr Brown said. But he added: “This may not be enough . . . It is becoming increasingly clear to me that we cannot delay and that we now need substantial additional resources.”

Asked whether Britain would contribute to the enhanced fund, he said: “We don’t rule out anything in this, because everybody has got to play their part in helping. But I think that, as happened in the Seventies, the big-surplus countries, those with big reserves, are in a position to help most and we will be urging them to do so.”

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