ASEAN benefiting from China's reform and opening up: Report
- By Zhang Jiaqi
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E-mail China.org.cn, October 25, 2018
China's reform and opening up has led to high growth and rapid development over the past 40 years, and ASEAN has benefited greatly in terms of trade and investment, according a report by to Dr. Hoe Ee Khor, chief economist of the ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO) released in Beijing on Oct. 25.
The report entitled "China's reform and opening up: Experiences, Prospects and Implications for ASEAN"is the latest product of an international organization founded in Singapore in April 2011 to engage in regional macroeconomic surveillance.
Dr. Hoe Ee Khor said that, over the past four decades, China had transformed itself from a planned to a market economy, shifted its overall economic focus from speed of growth to quality of development, and made significant progress in various areas including the real economy, market-oriented mechanisms, financial system, macro policy, and so on.
With China's role in the region expanding and evolving in the recent decades, the Chinese and ASEAN economies have become better integrated, and the latter has benefited greatly from the opening up of trade and investment to the international community, the report said.
He pointed to the examples of China's trade and investment in ASEAN, as well as the number of Chinese tourists to the region both increasing rapidly.
His report also predicts that China-ASEAN trade, investment and tourism will all flourish in moving forward in the years ahead.
China-ASEAN trade in goods will continue to thrive, propelled by increasing market size on both sides, greater cooperation in trade and connectivity, continued relocation of industries, and China's robust growth.
According to the report's projections, China-ASEAN trade is expected to rise from 10.4 percent of China's overall trade in 2017 to 15.8 percent in 2035; as a share of ASEAN trade, the relevant figures are from 16.7 percent in 2017 to 20 percent in 2035.
ASEAN's tourism revenue is also expected to grow rapidly from a further rise in Chinese outbound tourism, according to the report.
Dr. Hoe Ee Khor explained that, despite only moderate population growth, increasingly affluent people will consume more and travel more.
The report also predicts bright prospects for broader and deeper integration in the coming decades, as China and ASEAN countries are natural partners with many areas of complementarity.
"The 'Belt and Road' Initiative and ASEAN's vision for connectivity complement each other very well, which will be another driver of integration between the two regions besides the robust growth and other factors," the Singapore author argued.
However, he also pointed out in his presentation that China's reform is not finished and that it still faces with many challenges, such as an aging population, environmental problems, and so on.
"Political stability and leadership are very important," he said, adding that political stability helped address and overcome problems along the way of China's development and made it possible to move on to its next stage of reform to pursue quality development.
