Japan urges ASEAN to liberalize market

Japan urges ASEAN to liberalize market

Japan's top financial diplomat Haruhiko Kuroda urged Southeast Asia on Wednesday to promote intra-regional trade to cope with growing competition from China for foreign investment.

Vice Finance Minister for International Affairs Kuroda said members of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) should speed up its plans for an ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) now China was about to enter the World Trade Organization.

Kuroda said that although ASEAN had set targets for tariffs on most goods within the region to go below five percent by 2002, and to be abolished by 2015, these targets were too low. "If we look at the rapid changes in the world, these targets are quite a long way away," he told a business seminar in Bangkok.

He said China would become a "formidable competitor" for ASEAN after it becomes a new member of the WTO next month.

Despite their relatively small size, Kuroda said ASEAN countries were well endowed with ample human and natural resources and it was essential that ASEAN as a whole improved these attractions by creating a single market.

Ten-member ASEAN -- consisting of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam -- received 16-17 percent of the foreign direct investment pledged to Asia, according to WTO figures. -- Reuters