00:00Malaysia and its ASEAN partners have a narrow opportunity to strengthen supply chains and trade links as the United States and China temporarily ease tariff tensions.
00:11Economist Professor Wong Chin-Yong of University Tunku Abdul Rahman says the rivalry between the two powers is far from over, although a short period of calm may follow their talks in South Korea.
00:23Now, at this moment, what I can, my observation is, I do not think that the irisible clash between China and the United States or the decoupling between these two nations will happen.
00:41Given the fact that, you know, from the way that these two great powers interact, you will realize that China is not other countries in Trump's terrorist deal in the past couple of months.
00:55China being the only country that can really hit back and being able to battle against the wheels of Trump.
01:05So because of that, then also truth, the interactions between, you know, the back and forth in the past few days, then you will realize that this is a nation that Trump's probably at the team probably will have no idea yet on how to deal with.
01:23So and because of that, I believe that what we are going to observe in the meeting in South Korea, days after the ASEAN summit, even though I don't expect to have really a deal to be sealed truth, that kind of high level meeting, because at the end, all the books are done at the groundwork.
01:44So but I believe that tensions can probably be eased to some extent.
01:50Now, given that situation, so that basically gives a room for Malaysia and ASEAN as well to take a breath and therefore to continue what we are doing the best, that is to connect all these nations in the world through the supply chain in ASEAN and therefore to make the most out of it.
02:11He urged Malaysia as ASEAN chair to use this moment to strengthen regional cooperation by aligning the upgraded ASEAN-China trade back with the regional comprehensive economic partnership.
02:23Wong said better integration is key to avoiding overlapping rules that could confuse businesses and limit the benefits of both deals.
02:31Well, so how to integrate this R-STEP together with this upgraded version of FTA between China and ASEAN will be a very important element in order to make this FTA beneficial for everyone.
02:46Otherwise, you will be having another free trade agreement that basically will make things more complicated.
02:53And at the end, you're not going to see anyone utilizing this free trade agreement, which brings me to the second point.
03:01If you look back to the utilization of this R-STEP in the past two years, the rate was actually very low.
03:09For example, we have only 9 percent of exporters actually utilized those provisions in the R-STEP.
03:17Now, which amount to less than even 0.1 percent of total Malaysian exports to this R-STEP market, which means that even though we have those benefits written on the paper, without full utilization at the end, it will be just the benefits on the paper.
03:32It won't be benefiting the economy and the companies as well.
03:36So, the second point will be...
03:38So, the second point will be...
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