MANILA – The Philippines has notched among the highest usage of ASEAN trade deals in the region, experts said this month, urging neighbors to adopt the country’s outreach campaigns to help more businesses reap integration gains.
Efforts to help entrepreneurs meet requirements for obtaining lower tariffs -such as programs implemented by the Philippines–could bridge the gap between Southeast Asian firms’ current preference for using bilateral instead of regional deals, the experts said.
“ASEAN-led FTAs have been generally underused,” Alexander C. Chandra, TKN Southeast Asia Coordinator for the International Institute for Sustainable Development and Ruben Hattari, executive director of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Business Advisory Council, said in a report published in Indonesia.
“Notably, in many instances, the utilization rates of bilateral FTAs pursued by an individual ASEAN member state are generally higher in comparison to those carried out under the ASEAN framework,” it added.
This, as the experts recalled findings from an ASEAN-Business Advisory Council survey in 2012 stating that firms in the region were generally hindered by the lack of information on ASEAN initiatives.
The Philippines, however, is said to have fared better in terms of ASEAN trade deal usage on the back of deliberate efforts to inform firms and facilitate documentary compliance.
Chandra and Hattari pointed to findings from the ASEAN Secretariat in 2010 that the Philippines was “rated the highest user of FTAs (free trade agreements) among Southeast Asian countries.”
They also cited previous reports pegging Philippine usage of the ASEAN-Australia-New Zealand trade deal at 76.1% in 2012 as compared against Thailand (24.6% in 2011), Vietnam (15.9% in 2011), and Indonesia (1% in 2012).
Other countries like Indonesia, which has had a poor showing in usage rates would thus do well to “learn from its neighbor, the Philippines, in its attempt to improve the awareness and utilization of the country’s FTAs,” the two experts said.
They particularly pointed to the Doing Business in Free Trade Areas (DBFTA) program of the Department of Trade and Industry, which they described as a multi-pronged effort of engaging the public, strengthening inter-agency links, and establishing policy networks.
The DBFTA program has already rolled out 60 information sessions for 6,522 participants in the first half of 2013 on top of the 11,169-participant tally for 2012.
One of the program’s activities, the face-to-face FTA Clinic which allows entrepreneurs to seek advice from trade and custom officials, could for instance be “very useful in enhancing FTA awareness,” the two experts said.
“The result of such an endeavor speaks for itself,” they said.
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