BANGKOK, July 6: Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said on Saturday that Southeast Asian countries should consider introducing a common currency to help boost their economies and deepen intra-regional trade.

Mahathir told a meeting of the Thai-Malaysia Business Council that the 10 members of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) should cooperate more economically and try to become less dependent on the US dollar.

We in ASEAN should seriously study possibility of using a common ASEAN currency, he said in reply to a question about intra-regional trade. We should be watching the euro currency...maybe it’s very good for ASEAN...It is bound to help our business, our economies.

ASEAN groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

Mahathir, who plans to retire late next year, gave no timeframe for the proposal.

A single currency for Southeast Asia or for a wider East Asian region has been discussed tentatively since Europe began to move towards a common currency more than a decade ago.

But the economies of Southeast Asia are highly diverse, ranging from very poor nations such as Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia, to very rich countries such as Singapore and Brunei.

Economists say these tremendous differences probably mean any single currency for the region — even if it were considered advantageous — would be at least 50 years away.

Mahathir, on a three-day official visit to Thailand, forecast trade between ASEAN members would increase significantly in the next few years and said members should strengthen their own contacts before trying to forge closer links with economies further afield.

We should try to make ASEAN work properly and then we should also try to have a very important cooperation within ASEAN and the very highly developed countries of Northeast Asia.

It is better to work stage by stage...It’s better to consolidate what we have at the moment.

—Reuters