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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