October 7, 2003	Tuesday	Sha’aban 10, 1424

NUSA DUA (Indonesia), Oct 6: Southeast Asian leaders, sidestepping Myanmar’s embarrassing political crackdown, focused on Monday on ways to revive their one-time “miracle economies” through a proposed single market for their 530 million people.

Myanmar’s Prime Minister Khin Nyunt arrived on Monday for a two-day summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) starting on Tuesday.

But Asean leaders meeting in Bali were eager to shift the focus to the “Bali Concord II” — which includes plans to form a single market and production base by 2020. On Monday the accent was firmly on the economy.

“Asean should get our act together,” Singapore Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong told a high-level business conference on the sidelines of the summit.

“We must make it easy for investors to take advantage of each other’s competitive strengths if we want to sustain economic growth and to regain our dynamism.”

Most of the region achieved growth rates in the 1980s and 1990s which stunned the world. The financial crisis of 1997 brought the miracle to an end. Growth rates are healthy again in several Asean states but terror attacks and an outbreak of the respiratory disease Sars were another setback.

Mr Goh said bottlenecks to trade still existed in areas such as custom procedures, product standards and administrative barriers.

He said the need for Asean economic integration had become more urgent because the collapse of world trade talks in Cancun had spurred growing bilateralism and regionalism.

“We must push towards an Asean Economic Community (AEC): a single production base and a single market with free movement of goods, services and capital.”

Similar calls came from Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and Philippine President Gloria Arroyo.

The summit is due to endorse the creation of an AEC, which envisions an European Union-style integrated market by 2020. Singapore and Thailand are pushing for an earlier date. It was expected to be mentioned in the closing statement since the crisis had “a direct impact on Asean’s sense of security.”

Southeast Asia is also pursuing free trade with its regional competitors. Asean will also sign a free trade area pact with India and an agreement with Japan with provisions for such an area.

FREE TRADE: Southeast Asian nations and China agreed on Monday on a special tariff-busting programme to kickstart their grand plan to set up the world’s largest free trade area (FTA), officials said.

Trade ministers from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) and the world’s most populous nation adopted a protocol paving the way for the implementation from January 1, 2004 of a so-called “early harvest programme” under the FTA.

The three-year programme is largely a concession by China to give early benefits to the Asean states through tariff reductions on a host of agricultural and manufactured goods while the actual implementation of the FTA begins on January 1, 2005, officials said.

“The protocol today fleshed out an early harvest programme which provides specific benefits for Asean countries pending the adoption of an actual tariff-reduction agreement for the FTA,” Asean Secretary-General Ong Keng Yong told AFP.

The meeting on Indonesia’s Bali resort island precedes a summit between Asean leaders and their counterparts from China, Japan and South Korea.—AFP