Trade boost seen between Asean, Black Sea nations
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Cooperation between Asean and the Black Sea Economic Cooperation has the potential to boost their economies amid the tapering of global growth.
“Bilateral cooperation between Thailand and some of these countries may be unattractive or hard to achieve. Multilateral cooperation between regional organisations may be a good choice to start with,” Suthiphand Chirathivat, executive director of the Asean Studies Centre, said recently.
Ties between these organisations should be promoted as their countries are developing and emerging markets, he said.
The workshop on “The Asean Economic Community 2015 and the Black Sea Economic Cooperation: Exploring Current Experiences and Multilateral Cooperation” at Chulalongkorn University marked the beginning of academic relations between these regional organisations.
The first track of government-to-government meetings between the two agencies will be a welcome development.
Turkey, a leading nation of BSEC, and Malaysia of Asean are considered as moderate Muslim countries with rising per-capita income.
As Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra is visiting Turkey this week to boost political and economic relations, the broadening of cooperation between the two regions is not unforeseeable.
“This will lead to an exchange of knowledge that can benefit both sides institutionally and economically,” he said.
Production networks between the two regions are presently disconnected, but a connection could be made with the government-driven policies, he added.
Tourism
Colin Durkop, director of the Turkish office of Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, sees opportunities in the tourism and trading industries of the regions. More tourists are traveling between the two regions. People connectivity has been developed. There are many direct flights between the countries of both regional organisations.
Agriculture and machinery are the main industries that the two regions could see a significant increase in after the two sides draw closer, he added.
BSEC has 12 members – Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Georgia, Greece, Moldova, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Turkey and Ukraine – with a population of about 330 million.
