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PETALING JAYA: It is important for some countries to open their borders to support trade and recovery, although the form and nature of recovery between individual ASEAN members remains uncertain and may vary by country, Principal Investigator at the Yusof Institute Ishak (ISEAS) in Singapore. Dr. Jayant Menon said in a webinar.
By dividing Asean’s management of the Covid-19 pandemic into three groups, he said the Philippines and Indonesia were still struggling to control its spread, Malaysia and Myanmar had managed to control it only to face a new wave and there were those who had things under control. .
He spoke yesterday at the “Prosperity Initiative 2020 Forum: Post-pandemic Recovery for Asean” organized by the Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs (IDEAS).
A “rebalancing” is needed between domestic travel and the opening of borders, he said in the first of the two-day webinar.
He said it could be that some countries were experiencing new waves because domestic restrictions had eased too quickly and done so to support the economy.
He said the Asean members would likely have bottomed out in the second quarter, and how they would bounce back, be it a V-, U-, L- or W-shaped rally, only time would tell.
Vietnam and Brunei have managed to avoid a recession, he said.
The recession has been “worsened” by containment policy, which can be mitigated by economic policy.
Although richer countries may spend more to mitigate the impact of the pandemic, it is not possible to stimulate an economy into a lockdown, he said.
But what can be done is to enlist disaster relief to try to prevent businesses from falling and increasing deaths, he added.
Another speaker, the associate director of the Asian Trade Center, Juan Sebastián Cortés-Sánchez, focused on the recently concluded Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) event, which brings together ASEAN with Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand and Korea. South.
Although the RCEP has been hailed as the first free trade agreement between three of Asia’s largest economies, namely China, Japan and South Korea, Cortez-Sánchez said the group faced tariffs with different terms for each during the next 10-15 years.
However, the world’s largest trading bloc will show promise around 2030 or 2040.
He also said that the recent RCEP meeting did not mention enough about the rules for the digital economy, although the pandemic had reinforced their importance.
The executive director of the Apec secretariat, Tan Sri, Dr. Rebecca Sta Maria, said that it was not possible to reap the benefits of the RCEP agreements in one or two years.
“Don’t downgrade the work that has been done on the RCEP and compare it to other agreements because (these other) agreements may have been around longer,” he said.
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