ASEAN still attracts investors

JAKARTA (JP): Former U.S. state secretary Alexander M. Haig said yesterday ASEAN would remain attractive for investors provided it maintained high economic growth.

Speaking at the first ASEAN business summit, Haig said ASEAN's economic growth was unmatched anywhere in the world and would be so until early next century.

"I believe, in the face of tight competition, ASEAN will continue to remain attractive for global investors," Haig told the summit, which was attended by 700 business leaders from ASEAN and its trading partners.

ASEAN's has averaged 7 percent economic growth over the last decade.

He said ASEAN had become a strategic political and economic player on the world stage.

ASEAN would continue to survive and win in the post-Cold War era which was characterized by rapid change, he said.

"The period has witnessed more systemic, structural and ideological changes than during any other period in modern history," he said.

The first change was the long-predicted structural change from a bipolar world dominated by two nuclear superpowers to a multi- polar world in which new centers of political, economic and military powers were emerging, he said.

The second change was the emergence of interdependence among countries characterized by the explosion of information technology, he said.

Haig said the increasing role of television, radio, and most recently the Internet had put the political leaders under pressure.

"People demand answers almost as instantaneously as the news they are receiving in ever increasing quantities," he said.

The vice chairman of the Indonesian Surveillance Board, Juwono Sudarsono, said doing business in the region could not be separated from politic life.

"Business and economic interaction do not take place in a political vacuum," he said.

Juwono attributed ASEAN's economic success partly to cooperation between ASEAN and the U.S. and Japan.

But he said ASEAN faced several challenges like globalization, regionalism, nationalism, provincialism and localism.

Regionalism

Speaking on regionalism he said the comparative and competitive advantage of doing business with neighboring nations should be consideration when doing business.

"Here we talk about the ASEAN Free Trade Area and the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum facing the North American Free Trade Agreement, the European Union, and Japan," he said.

The third pressure was the importance maintaining nation states because "nation state remains the basic element for conducting political and business transactions," he said.

Yuwono said provincialism existed in every nation. Provincialism is when provinces want to maintain their market in a nation's economy.

Provinces will seek to maintain a market share in economic development, he said.

"The growth triangles among the ASEAN states and in the Pacific region demands this," he said.

He said the next pressure was localism or "the pressure from local tribes and ethnic groups demanding their own market share."

He said these pressures should be deal with properly. "From globalization to localism, it demands work, trade and military craft to be applied more justly," Juwono said. (09)