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DA NANG, Vietnam: Finance and banking senior officials from the
10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) and its
three partners China, Japan and South Korea are meeting here
Thursday to tackle the economic issues, among others, the degrading
global economy and increasing Asian inflation rates.
The Asean, which comprises Indonesia, the
Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Brunei, Vietnam, Laos,
Myanmar and Cambodia, sought ways to foster financial and monetary
policy coordination and the region’s financial systems, and
further probing into the issues discussed by the informal AFDM + 3
on April 2 in Vietnam’s central Da Nang city during the two-day
formal Asean + 3 Finance and Central Bank Deputies’ Meeting
(formal AFDM + 3) Thursday afternoon.
At the one-day informal meeting, finance and
central bank deputies shared views that the Asean + 3 economies will
be influenced by significant developments in the context of trade
liberalization and foreign investment, and that inflation in the
region is increasing in the face of surging world prices of such
fuels and commodities as oil and food.
However, they assumed that the price tension
seems to lessen, prices to decline by the end of this year, and that
the Asean + 3 are expected to maintain reasonably high economic
growth rate of 4.7 percent in the year, down from 5.4 percent last
year. The weaker demand for exports will be partly offset by the
stable rising domestic demand.
They also stated that the global economic
outlook is unclear because of the complexity of recovery from the
subprime mortgage turmoil and solutions for related financial
accounts in the United States. The global economic growth is
estimated at 3.7 percent in 2008, compared with 4.9 percent in 2007.
The formal and informal AFDM + 3 are one of the
preparation meetings for the 12th Asean Finance Ministers’ Meeting
slated for April 4 in Da Nang.
After the regional financial crisis in 1997, the
Asean countries became more aware of the importance of beefing up
their cooperation with key Southeast Asia partners that includes
China, Japan and South Korea.
-- Xinhua
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