By IANS
New Delhi : As Asian leaders meet in Singapore next week for an annual summit, India has revived the idea of an integrated Asian Economic Community that it believes could become the “epicentre of global economy”.
Speaking at a conference on Asian Economic Integration in New Delhi, Indian external affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee admitted an initiative towards an Asian Economic Community will “take a great deal of time, energy and perseverance to translate this vision into reality”.
“But we should at least start thinking about the idea and develop the roadmap for its realization,” he said.
Mukherjee said that the East Asia Summit to be held in Singapore next week will be “an important development in the direction of building a cooperative architecture in Asia”
East Asia Summit comprises members of the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean), Japan, China, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and India. India has been consistently lobbying for a larger Asian Economic Community, as opposed to a smaller Asean plus three format.
With the summit providing a suitable platform for initiating an East Asian Community which could “be an important step in the direction of creation of an “arc of advantage and prosperity” that would act as an anchor of stability and development for Asia and beyond,” said Mukherjee, referring to the term used by India and Japan in their 2005 Joint Statement.
“Studies… show that economic integration within the East Asian Community has the potential to generate billions of dollars of new output and thus serve as an engine of growth for the continent and the world economy,” he noted.
Mukherjee envisioned financial cooperation in Asia to exploit the “huge foreign exchange reserves of Asian countries” that could have the “potential of creating hundreds of billions of dollars of additional output while helping to overcome the infrastructural constraints for Asian development”.
Pointing out that at $80 billion East Asia is now India’s largest trade partner ahead of European Union and United States, Mukherjee said, “an open and fast growing India has much to offer to Asia”.
“It is with this conviction that India espouses a vision of an Asian Economic Community that could drive Asia’s emergence as the epicentre of the global economy”.
“It is incumbent on us to put in place a political and economic architecture which is conducive to Asia’s emergence as a pre-eminent region of stability and prosperity,” added the minister.