Leading world powers say Asian crisis far from over

Leading world powers say Asian crisis far from over

MANILA (Agencies): Leading world powers said yesterday Asia's
financial crisis was far from over but expressed confidence that
the region would eventually recover its economic vigor.

U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told a meeting of
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) foreign ministers
there was no questioning the severity of the crisis.

"All across this region, families that had joined the ranks of
the middle class are now finding it hard to put food on the
table, while families that were once poor are now desperate,"
Albright said.

Until the financial crisis struck last year, Asian nations had
made remarkable achievements over three decades, "lifting more
people out of poverty more rapidly than any comparable group of
nations in history", Albright said.

"The economic crisis has eroded these gains but it has not
erased them. Not by a long shot... The United States has great
confidence that in time the nations of this region will return to
growth," she said.

The crisis began in Thailand in mid-1997 and rapidly spread,
causing many currencies and stocks to tumble, prompting
widespread bankruptcies and job losses and triggering bail-out
packages led by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for
Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea.

Chinese Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan acknowledged that
Beijing had originally underestimated the severity of the
problems.

"The ferocity with which the crisis broke out, its extensive
scale and severe consequences went beyond our expectation," he
said.

Japan, urged by ASEAN last week to get its economy back on the
path of growth, reiterated that prime minister-designate Keizo
Obuchi hoped to do just that with a mix of tax cuts, government
spending and financial reform.

But Japan also said it was "extremely important" for the nine-
member ASEAN to help bring about a recovery by doing more to
integrate the region's economies.

ASEAN groups Brunei, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the
Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

It said the onus was on ASEAN "to further strengthen its
efforts toward integration of the region into a single consumer
market and a single production center through the liberalization
of trade and investment..."

Asian and Western countries created a forum yesterday to try
to reduce spiraling poverty and other social costs of Asia's
economic crisis.

The Caucus on Social Safety Nets was established at a meeting
of the nine-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations and its
"dialogue partners" -- a group of richer countries including the
United States, the European Union and Japan.

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