Finance ministers from South Korea, Japan and China agreed Thursday to make further efforts on financial cooperation in the Asian region.
During a meeting on the sidelines of the 39th annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank, South Korean Finance Minister Han Duck-soo and his counterparts from China and Japan -- Jin Renqing, Sadakazu Tanigaki -- welcomed the completion of follow-up talks to the so-called Chiang Mai Initiative (CMI).
"We welcomed the completion of the CMI review, which started in the 2004 ASEAN+3 Finance Ministers's Meeting in Jeju. We also agreed to make continuous efforts to seek the possibility to further enhance the regional financial cooperation beyond the CMI," the joint statement said.
Despite diplomatic rows over shared history and territory, the three countries have been working with other Asian countries to boost economic ties since the unprecedented financial meltdown hit the region in late 1997.
A good example of this cooperation, the CMI is a regional network of bilateral currency swap arrangements that gives Asian central banks more ammunition when their respective currencies come under speculative attack.
The pact and the Asian bond market initiative are the two key policies aimed at promoting regional economic and financial cooperation.
The finance ministers will have further talks on a newly proposed system in which a country experiencing financial turmoil would be able to ask another country in the region to coordinate the activation of multiple bilateral currency swap deals, according to officials.
This would save time for the country in trouble and is seen as a step towards making the CMI scheme a single multilateral arrangement rather than a complex network of bilateral deals, they said.
They are expected to agree on doubling the total size of the currency swap deals at a meeting later in the day with finance ministers from Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries. Last year, they vowed to double the amount of swap deals, which totaled US$39.5 billion in May 2005.
ASEAN comprises Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
The three nations also agreed to launch a joint study of a proposed single currency for the region and the creation of a regional bond market.
"We also reaffirmed our strong commitment to promote other regional cooperation projects such as the Asian Bond Market Initiative (AMBI)... We agreed on further study of related issues, including the usefulness of regional currency units," the statement said.
The three finance ministers also agreed on joint efforts to obtain increased voting rights at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to better reflect the significance of their economies to the global economy.
"We emphasized the importance of an ad hoc quota increase in IMF... On our side, we will strengthen our participation in the IMF activities," they said.
South Korea is one of the nations calling for adjustments to the vote quotas currently allotted to IMF members. South Korea, whose economy is the 11th-largest in the world and the fourth-largest in Asia, exercises only 0.77 percent of the total votes at the IMF, ranking it 28th in power among the organization's 184 members.
South Korea's annual gross domestic product (GDP) per capita was just US$67 when it joined the IMF in 1955, making it one of the poorest members at the time. South Korea's per capita GDP was approximately $14,000 last year.
(Yonhap News Agency)
Korea, China, Japan Agree on Financial Cooperation |
