Malaysia - Asean should start acting as one region

KUALA LUMPUR (June 14, 2012): Asean countries are expecting an agreement on an Asean banking framework, the creation of a single Asean stock exchange and greater regional collaboration to strengthen domestic currency bond markets, said CIMB Group group chief executive Datuk Seri Nazir Razak.

"The challenge now is to start acting as one region, to evolve policy coordination into a common framework for managing and growing a regional economy," Nazir said in his opening remarks at the CIMB Asean Conference 2012 yesterday.

"We lack the finance infrastructure to optimise our region's high savings level. Our financial markets are not deep enough or integrated enough to fund these large infrastructure projects, even though we have large reserves," he said, adding that Asean countries have already applied the hard lessons learned from the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis to ensure relative stability in their individual economies in the midst of a volatile global economy.

He said the region must capitalise on its demographic dividend as it is blessed with a young population that is urbanising rapidly.

"The key bottleneck in tapping this is infrastructure, particularly in logistics and connectivity. If our relevance lies in being the crossroads of Asia, the meeting place and connector, we must make sure our connectivity infrastructure is up to the task, and our cities are capable of absorbing and channelling the productive energies of millions of new entrants every year into the global workforce."

Nazir said the region must vigorously grow trade by pursuing free trade agreements, whether individually or as Asean, and by bringing down barriers, especially non-trade barriers within Asean.

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