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China can contribute much in cooperation with ASEAN

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2009-04-10 13:49

China could contribute much to the Association of Southeast Asia Nation (ASEAN) growth by providing the biggest supply in the Asian pooling fund that created by Asian countries, an Indonesian economist told Xinhua on Monday.

China also could maintain its market open to other Asian counterparts so that their trade could become more profitable.

"I think, that would be the China's biggest contributions to ASEAN," said Pande Radja Silalahi, an economist of Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

The pool of resources worth US$120 billion was created to defend regional currencies from global financial crisis.

In return, ASEAN could give more access to Chinese products as their export to rich countries is slowing down.

"China surely switched its market to other developing nations, particularly ASEAN. Meanwhile, ASEAN should classify what they can get from China," Hendri Saparini, an economist at the Econit Advisory Group.

She added that the need of ASEAN and China to get closer is much bigger now amidst global financial crisis and that would make their cooperation more balanced.

"A cooperation should bring the same benefit to each parties. Otherwise, it won't last longer," said Pande.

Pande also said that the global recovery would depend much on Asian developing countries, especially China, due to its huge forex reserves and economy volume.

"China is very big country. If China is sick, its disease would spread to the world, like America's disease now," Pande said.

In an effort to counter the economy crisis, the finance ministers of the 10 members of the ASEAN plus China, Japan and the Republic of Korea (ROK), agreed on February to create the foreign-exchange reserves pool to address liquidity shortages.

Later, the ministers increased the original proposal of US$80 billion by 50 percent.