Private sector leaders meet to tackle Asean trade issues

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Top business leaders from the 10 member-states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) will convene next month to tackle issues and concerns about regional trade amid ongoing preparations for the establishment of the Asean Economic Community (AEC) by end-2015.

The Asean Business Club (ABC), a private sector-driven initiative for the region’s major homegrown corporations, said the ABC Forum 2014 to be held in Singapore on Sept. 8 and 9 was primarily aimed at promoting sector-based discussions to enhance the Asean agenda.

“(The forum) seeks to help better prepare the Asean region’s business community for AEC, which will establish a single market and production base by 2015. It also aims to help attract more investments in the region, initiate reforms, prepare the work force for market integration and improve the region’s competitiveness alongside neighboring economic giants China, Japan and India,” ABC explained in a statement.

According to the group, the forum, which is expected to gather more than 300 business leaders in the region, would focus primarily on six sectors, namely legal and tax; automotive and manufacturing; financial services and capital markets; minerals, oil and gas; food and agriculture, and retail.

Discussions in the forum will be included in the Asean Business Club’s “Lifting-the-Barriers” reports on each of the sectors and the reports—which will highlight industry barriers and bottlenecks as well as propose solutions—will be delivered later to Asean officials and economic ministers in the region.

The forum, to be chaired by AirAsia Group CEO Tony Fernandes, is being organized by the ABC and the CIMB Asean Research Institute (Cari).

Cari is a public organization committed to the development of the AEC and serves as the secretariat of the ABC, whose members include some of the most prominent business leaders in the region, among them Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala, Nazir Razak, Tony Fernandes, Patrick Walujo, Chairul Tanjung, Chartsiri Sophonpanich, Tos Chirathivat, Cezar Consing, Chew Gek Khim, Goh Yew Lin and Thura K. Ko.

Businesses across the region are bracing for the potential impact of a fully integrated regional economy by 2015, which will see a freer flow of goods, services, skilled labor, investments and capital. Tariff-wise, the Asean has already gained a major headway as most of the import duties in the region have been slashed to zero since January 2010.

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