Asian markets urge private sector to increase disclosures
Asian markets urge private sector to increase disclosures
HANOI (Agencies): Southeast Asia and its regional partners called on the international private sector Thursday to step up financial disclosure, which they said was crucial to avert future economic shocks.
"We will propose more effort and moral suasion, if you like to say, from international agencies and much developed countries for having some more disclosure and transparency not only from the public sector side but also the private sector side," said Miranda Goeltom, a director of the central Bank Indonesia.
"Everybody agrees it is a very important issue but everybody also agrees that it can only be beneficial if disclosures are not only limited to public sector disclosures but also private sector disclosures," she said.
Miranda was speaking to reporters following a meeting of vice finance chiefs of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and deputy central bank governors with their counterparts from Japan, China and South Korea.
Miranda said ASEAN wanted "more understanding from the institutional investors, from the private investors, to provide more information and more data so that any monitoring could be made more effective."
Jin Li-Qun, vice minister of finance for China, said international financial institutions and developed countries should recognize that the crisis-hit countries had done much to improve their standards of transparency.
"The target is always directed at the countries, at the governments, rather than the financial institutions," he told reporters.
"We should take into account the fact that a number of countries, particularly crisis-hit economies, have done a lot of work to improve their monitoring systems. This is very encouraging," he said.
"We should not just be looking at the economies, but looking at international financial institutions in the private sector to do things in this area," he added.
ASEAN groups Brunei, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.
ASEAN is thrashing out the structure of a surveillance process, which includes an early alert scheme that will warn member economies of impending financial shocks.
Surveillance
Miranda said that compliance with a financial surveillance mechanism designed to prevent future economic collapse in Southeast Asia would be voluntary
But Miranda added that it was vital ASEAN collected financial data from member countries to develop an early warning system.
Vietnam has said the mechanism, called the ASEAN Surveillance Process, would be the most important point raised at a two-day meeting in Hanoi between regional finance ministers which opens on Friday.
"This information will be informal, which is not compulsory. It's more voluntary but the understanding is that everyone is willing to participate," Miranda told Reuters on the sidelines of preparatory meetings between ASEAN finance officials.
"It's informal in nature but compulsory in our hearts. I think everybody agrees it's important to share some information so we can tackle the regional problems and the attitude to this surveillance process has been very positive in every country."
The ASEAN Surveillance Process is a peer review mechanism expected to track trends in macroeconomic indicators among the member countries -- Brunei, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
Agreed in Jakarta one year ago amid little fanfare, the measure represents a major response to Asia's crisis, officials say. But getting nations such as communist Vietnam, which classifies some data as a state secret, to comply could prove tough, diplomats have said.