At the Asian Financial Forum 2014 in Hong Kong, a workshop examined the opportunities and challenges of the upcoming ASEAN Economic Community. Summarizing the most interesting comments, this video highlights not only general opportunities but also presents key interests for Chinese and Hongkongese businesses.
Key opportunities of the ASEAN Economic Community – AEC
- A single market economic community of more than 600 million people.
- Strengthening ASEAN and enhancing its political and economic power.
- Both China and ASEAN expect that the AEC will enable to expand their trade and economic partnership further.
- ASEAN Foreign Direct Investments in China are even larger than Chinese FDI in ASEAN.
- With the AEC, ASEAN hopes to tackle trade imbalances with China, increase investments from China and receive more Chinese tourists.
- The population of ASEAN is not only vast but also has a growing middle class, which creates a high consumer demand with large spending on housing, banking and services for the property market, credit cards, education, luxury goods, hotels development.
- There is an important mismatch of skills and labor that could be addressed between ASEAN and China to better utilize the large workforce of Asia.
- ASEAN countries and China are very rich in resources, with certain countries presenting untapped reserves, specific skills such as exploration, design, marketing that could beneficial to the others.
- Over 60,000 items now have zero import tariffs in ASEAN.
- Each ASEAN country has Free-Trade Agreements – FTA – with the others as well as outside countries. The ASEAN Free-Trade Agreements have opened trade up, but these FTAs could be used by companies to stimulate trade a lot more.
2014 Asian Financial Forum – AEC workshop speakers
- Zhou Li – China Daily Asia Pacifi, Hong Kong SAR
- Ngurah Swajaya – ambassador for Indonesia to ASEAN
- Li Yao – CEO, China-ASEAN Investment Cooperation Fund, China
- Michael Yeoh – Asian Strategy and Leadership Institute, Malaysia
- Anthony Wu – Bauhinia Foundation Research Center
- Xiao Geng – Vice President of Research, Fund Global Institute
- Sinthya Roesly – President, Indonesia Infrastructure Guarantee Fund
- Roy Kuan – Managing Partner, Asia, CVC Capital Partners
- Presented by Joe Kainz of the Hong Kong Trade Development Center
This video on the 2014 Asian Financial Forum was published in January 2014 by the Hong Kong Trade Development Council
