PHNOM PENH/MANILA — A planned economic union in Southeast Asia is likely to be delayed by a year because some countries are not ready, said Surin Pitsuwan, secretary-general of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
A Philippine official confirmed this, but stressed that a deferment still had to be approved at an upcoming summit and would require the consideration of many viewpoints.
Mr. Surin said economic ministers from the 10 ASEAN countries had asked him for the delay at a meeting in late August and he would put the idea to heads of government at a summit in November.
Foreign ministers decided in April that the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) should start on Jan. 1, 2015, he told a meeting of energy ministers in Phnom Penh.
“Your economic colleagues looked around the landscape and realized that they need one more year, so they have asked me to communicate with all sectoral bodies up to the leaders that we should speak with one voice,” he said.
The bloc would therefore be born on Dec. 31, 2015.
In Manila, Finance Undersecretary Rosalia V. de Leon confirmed that a delay had been sought but noted that it “will still have to be discussed in the meeting in November. It won’t involve just finance but other ministerial levels such as trade and energy.”
“From a finance standpoint, there may be hard lessons to learn with the financial crisis and the troubles in European Union,” she told BusinessWorld.
Foreign Affairs and Malacañang officials, meanwhile, said they needed to know the details and declined to comment.
The AEC would allow free movement of goods, capital and skilled labor across a region with a combined economy of $2 trillion and 600 million people.
ASEAN groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, countries with vastly different political and economic systems.
Mr. Surin, explaining the proposed delay to the AEC, said a number of challenges needed to be addressed, including bridging development gaps between member countries.
“The world is expecting us to get there all together,” he said, suggesting the AEC would lose credibility if it did not include all 10 ASEAN members.
A border dispute between Thailand and Cambodia plus, more recently, competing territorial claims by four of its members, and China and Taiwan, in the South China Sea have also laid bare diplomatic differences within.
Some analysts have suggested the AEC might not start as a fully formed bloc, and that its more developed members might have to push on with integration in a two-tier model, leaving the others at risk of missing out on regional investment.
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Source: Reuters with a report from Diane Claire J. Jiao, BusinessWorld. (12 September 2012)
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