U.S. says ASEAN offers top business opportunities
U.S. says ASEAN offers top business opportunities
BANGKOK (Reuter): Acting U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce Timothy Hauser said on Saturday Washington considered it a top priority to boost the U.S. business presence in the seven-member Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN).
Hauser, leading a U.S. delegation to and Vietnam, said ASEAN had rivaled or surpassed most emerging markets in potential for U.S. export growth.
He told reporters and U.S. business executives in Asia at a function here that U.S. exports to ASEAN totaled US$39 billion in 1995, slightly less than the $45 billion in exports to China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
ASEAN groups Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
"It is a critically important region for the U.S. business community. I am leading a group of 14 small and medium-sized American companies to see business opportunities (in Thailand and Vietnam)," he said at a press briefing.
Hauser was flying to Hanoi later on Saturday where he would open a new U.S. commerce center to promote American trade and investment in Vietnam.
"The center will represent a tangible, visible step to the American business community that the government is in there working with them to create conditions for expanded trade," he told reporters.
Hauser said he would hold talks in Hanoi on high Vietnamese import tariffs faced by U.S. products, protection of U.S. intellectual property rights, and the absence in Vietnam of a clear legal structure under which American and foreign companies operated in the country.
He said any future decision by Washington to grant Vietnam the Most Favored Nation (MFN) status, along with preferential tariffs for Vietnamese products entering the U.S., must be preceded by a bilateral trade pact still being negotiated.
The senior U.S. commerce department official said he asked Thai officials to liberalize the fasting growing Thai auto industry to benefit major and small independent American car and auto parts producers.
Hauser said he did not specifically lobby for General Motors, which is weighing a plan to open a big car assembly plant either in Thailand or the Philippines.
Hauser said Thailand's 35 percent tariff on imported car part materials, against its 20 percent tax on finished products, made it tough for independent American auto parts makers to open plants here.