Skip Kissinger of USAID addresses participants at the SEA CLIR (South East Asia Commercial Legal and Institutional Reform )Trade Forum.

Leaders Discuss Need for Regional Reforms at SEA CLIR Trade Forum

Participants from five ASEAN-member countries debate strategies

Friday, March 21, 2008

Opinion leaders from five Southeast Asian nations this week voiced their support for measures to improve trade, deepen regional and global integration, and build a stronger business environment within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Participants at the SEA CLIR Trade Forum discussed ways to build a robust business environment by expanding free trade zones, streamlining customs procedures, developing trade policies, improving company registration, strengthening dispute resolution, building better lending institutions, and enabling property ownership or ownership-like rights.

The U.S. Agency for International Development sponsored the conference attended by influential members from the public and private sectors in Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, the Philippines and Vietnam. Participants from both the public and private sectors discussed the importance of transparency and reform to enhance their national legal and regulatory frameworks with the goal of building a unified ASEAN Community by 2015.

"The ASEAN Economic Community Blueprint is designed to create a single market and production base by 2015," said Sundram Pushpanathan, Principal Director of the Bureau for Economic Integration and Finance, at the ASEAN Secretariat. "This will require significant harmonization of rules and regulations throughout the region."

Participants called for unified standards for establishing companies and regional guidelines on land titling. They said ASEAN-member countries should build capacity among judges, attorneys and other professionals to settle commercial disputes, adding that court facilities needed to be improved and more computerization was needed to better administer justice. They said there was a need for institutions to be developed to provide advice on credit issues for new businesses, and that the time it takes to secure loans needed to be shortened.

Participants at the three-day forum reviewed the best practices identified in the regional report SEA CLIR Trade: Advancing a Regional Agenda for Shared Growth. The report was the cornerstone of the conference, building on individual country assessments in the South East Asia Commercial Legal and Institutional Reform (SEA CLIR) and Trade Diagnostics Report. The diagnostics review 16 areas of commercial law, trade, competition, intellectual property, etc. and are used to develop reforms and strengthen countries' laws and legal institutions.

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