Himalayan News Service

Kathmandu, July 26:

A two-day long meeting of country advisors of South Asia Sub-regional Economic Cooperation (SASEC) Programme was recently held at Asian Development Bank’s headquarters in Manila.

At the meeting, finance secretaries and senior officials from Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal reviewed the progress of the SASEC programme, and discussed the way forward and scope of the next phase of work. The meeting concluded with an agreement on how best to carry forward and further strengthen the programme, including building synergies with other neighbouring regional cooperation groupings. The future scope of activities under the six priority sectors was also discussed. The country advisors also agreed on the need to meet more regularly to maintain the momentum and progress under the programme, according to ADB.

Bhanu Prasad Acharya, secretary at the ministry of finance, represented Nepal in the meeting. SASEC was initiated in 2001 in response to a request from the South Asia Growth Quadrangle, formed by the four countries to help facilitate and support their economic cooperation agenda. Earlier in his inaugural speech, ADB president Haruhiko Kuroda, noted that growing regional cooperation in South Asia can directly contribute to the physical integration of Asia because of its central position as a land bridge between neighbouring regions. “For South Asia, opportunities and benefits from regional cooperation will be significantly increased if this cooperation can be extended beyond the region’s own geographical boundaries — to Southeast and East Asia,” he said.

South Asia is moving towards more market and trade-oriented policies, which is providing basic foundation for more effective regional cooperation and integration, Kuroda said.

“Regional cooperation can also be crucial for promoting peace and security without which, development efforts will achieve little.” Helped by its growing economic openness, Asia’s unparalleled economic growth over the past four decades has fuelled a significant decline in poverty that has improved the lives of millions of people in the region, he said. But despite being a vast region of 1.4 billion people, or almost one quarter of the world’s population, South Asia accounts for only two per cent of the world’s GDP. “The stark fact is that out of almost 700 million people living in poverty throughout Asia, some 430 million live in South Asia, that is 40 per cent of the world’s total poor,” he said. “Clearly then, we cannot achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in Asia, without achieving them in South Asia first. And there is much work to be done if this is going to happen.” While intra-regional trade in Asia now accounts for nearly half of all trade, this is not the case in South Asia, where intra-regional trade as a share of region’s total foreign trade is around four per cent, compared to 20 per cent for the ASEAN members.