MAIN PAGE | EVENTS & PROGRAMS | 2001 | IGM | SPEECHES | Person
PACIFIC BASIN ECONOMIC COUNCIL
MAIN PAGE | EVENTS & PROGRAMS | 2001 | IGM | SPEECHES | Person
Regional Vitality in the 21st Century
April 6-10, 2001 — Tokyo, Japan
Mr. Roberto F. De Ocampo
Good morning ladies and gentlemen, I'm glad to see that there are not too many blurry-eyed die-hard golfers who might have spent early morning watching the Masters. But for those of you who are die-hard golfers at least one global issue might have been settled in your mind meaning is Tiger Woods going to win the Grand Slam or not, which of course he did. Let me first take this opportunity to thank the PBEC for once again inviting me to chair a PBEC session. It is indeed an honor for me and it does give me an opportunity to once again do reasonably well at a PBEC golf tournament which I did last year and fortunately this year did reasonably well as well. Now I think I'll also like to take the opportunity to thank our Japanese hosts for their kind hospitality. I think the weather has been great but the hospitality has been even greater and it has made the session I think really quite a wonderful experience. I always enjoy being here in Japan. I've visited here many times and like many of you I presume that you have done what you can in the past few days to immerse yourself in some aspects of Japanese culture. Interestingly enough last night I was having dinner and it was something called Kobe beef and it was truly a delight. So I had to ask my hosts why is this so tender and so forth. And they said you know this beef, the cow is first of all fed with beer and then it is given a daily massage and while it is sitting in its enclosure, it has a continuous round of classical music. Wonderful I presume. One conclusion that can reached is that it's better to be a cow in Japan these days than it might be in some other places. But I think part of the reason that you smile is not so much that I am talking about something that is so off tangent and irrelevant but also because it does have some relevance to the subject matter today since issues such as those that I inferred do have their global implications. And the world has become so small that things that take place in one part of the world have impact all over the place. Yesterday, of course, we had the opportunity to hear various views during the Leaders Forum in terms of what can be done in this part of the world in our Pacific Basin area in order to make sure that we can move ahead and not only partake of increased global participation and interaction but take advantage of it in order to have a truly sterling 21st century for the Pacific Basin. Well, this morning during our first session we have in a sense a formidable subject matter to address the title being "Global Economic Issues and the Pursuit of Sustainable Growth and Regional Vitality". Surely, global economic issues are foremost in the minds of all of us here because following the Asian crisis we approach this century a little bit perhaps wary of what is going to take place then somewhat relieved that the Asian crisis was a bit shorter than many had expected. But now we see all kinds of things in the horizon as well and it is important for us to being to think how we are going to address this, how do we form the foundation for sustainable growth and regional vitality. Formidable as the subject matter might be, we do have a formidable panel of speakers this morning to address it who have all been introduced. I will call them up here one at a time to deliver their points of view and all of them have been immersed and continue to be immersed in global issues. As they come up to the rostrum here, they will speak for approximately 15 minutes each. They promise me backstage that I won't have to make smoke signals or unusual moves at my position there to remind them that their 15 minutes are up, after which we will have an open forum. After the third speaker, I will say a little something about how to conduct the open forum then we can proceed from there. [...] As Chair of this session, I'd like to thank all 3 speakers for staying within the average of 15 minutes each that we had agreed upon while maintaining a very substantive on the various angles and aspects of this issue. Thank you very much. I think, ladies and gentlemen, you will all agree with me that our speakers have given us a very thoughtful session here this morning which provides a pretty good springboard upon which other discussions following could arise. Mr. Hatakeyama emphasized the Shanghai APEC as an important event and of course the WTO, failing WTO, he thought perhaps free trade area development would be an interesting thing to continue. Sir John emphasized governance above all. He felt that while size matters, continental entities would have an advantage, there are smaller countries that have been able to show the way and the key to it all seems to be good governance that emphasizes human capital, access to capital, quality of life and of course what he called the moral dimension of capitalism. Dean O'Hare was very strong in this presentation that the WTO needs to get back on track, whoa to everybody else who will not get the advantages of the WTO's getting back on track and things could slow down significantly. I'm sure there are so many other issues that we could have talked about because this is a very wide-ranging subject matter. There are issues such as the restructuring of the international financial sector, issues about China and its role, issues on E-Commerce and many of these subject matters are going to be covered in much more detail in the succeeding sessions. But for this morning I hope you had an interesting time of it, many things to think about. We thank you very much for your kind attention, we thank you for your questions and above all we thank our distinguished panel of speakers for giving us an excellent kick-off to this morning's session. Thank you very much. |
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