VIENTIANE: South-East Asia’s 10-nation Asean bloc agreed yesterday to push for more rapid development of the region’s tourist industry, partly to help pay for soaring energy costs.

Asean economic ministers heard calls for Southeast Asian economies to accelerate their own integration as well as improve links with bigger Asian economies amid slowing regional growth and surging oil prices.

The meeting also reviewed an agreement reached last year for the more advanced economies in the group to remove import tariffs for products in 11 priority sectors by 2007, three years ahead of schedule.

A joint statement after the annual economic ministers meeting of the Association of South East Asian Nations said two of the priority areas, tourism and air travel, would see speedy integration even before 2007.

Asean Secretary General Ong Keng Yong said at a press conference huge tourism revenues in Asean countries could help pay for surging energy costs faced by their economies.

He said most Asean countries, strong in the tourism sector, could jointly offer tourists attractive packages of clustered, cross-border destinations.

Ong Keng Yong said the meeting found no easy answer on how to tackle the impact of high oil prices.

“Basically, there is very little that we can do apart from asking all of us to conserve energy. The best approach is therefore to stress the need to continue to invest and trade to sustain growth, so that at least even if we have to pay for high oil prices, we have at least the money and resources to foot the bills.”

Asean, which groups Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, Laos, Myanmar, Malaysia and Cambodia, aims to create a single market by 2020.

“It is important for Asean to further increase their concerted efforts to further deepen and broaden regional economic integration,” said Lao Prime Minister Bounnyang Vorachit in his opening address.

Asean members have also been moving to negotiate bilateral and regional free trade pacts with China, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, New Zealand, and the US.

Last November, Asean and Chinese leaders announced a plan to create a free-trade zone for their combined population of 1.8bn by 2010.

During 1993-2003, Asean exports to China nearly tripled while Chinese exports to the group more than quadrupled, according to Asean data.

On free trade agreements talks with major dialogue partners, Ong Keng Yong said the most sticky issue is Japan’s insistence on negotiating separately with each individual Asean member its stringent rules of origin.

One difficulty for Asean is that a marked diversity in the development of its members - for example, Cambodia’s annual per capita income in 2003 was $310 while Singapore’s was $20,987 - has limited the group’s achievements mainly to economic matters.

“Asean has been quite successful in economic co-operation, especially in areas like tariff cuts, but efforts to promote intra-investment or trade in services have made much slower progress,” said Somjai Phagaphasvivat of Thammasat University in Bangkok.

“Due to different stages of development, participation in debates on finance and services co-operation have invariably been confined to Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, the three more advanced members,” he said.

On the 2020 target of creating an EU-style single market, the ministers agreed at the end of their one-day meeting that liberalising the services sector could be undertaken faster and be achieved by 2015 at the latest, although some sensitive areas like finance and banking could take longer to achieve.

“Imagine countries like Laos and Myanmar which would probably still be not ready to allow Citibank to remit funds freely out of their countries by 2015. So we would be allowing flexibility in certain sub-sectors,” he said. - Reuters