Shopping centers in the resort island of Cebu stocked up on Chinese products ranging from toys to TVs and clothes to calculators after a surge in trade between China and ASEAN in recent years.
Trade totaled US$160.8 billion last year, a 23 percent rise over 2005, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) said yesterday. The full-year 2005 figure of US$130.4 billion was roughly 16 times that of 1991.
Wen was speaking at a summit with ASEAN in which the two sides signed an agreement set to give another boost to economic exchanges.
From July China will open its lucrative services sector to Southeast Asian firms in sectors including energy, telecommunications, real estate and information technology.
"This marks a key step forward for the establishment of a China-ASEAN free-trade area," Wen told ASEAN leaders before the signing. The free trade zone -- which would be the world's biggest, covering nearly two billion people -- is set to come into force in 2010.
"This should round out the liberalization of the trade between ASEAN and China," said Rodolfo Severino, former ASEAN secretary-general and now senior research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore.
"I think opening up the services sector would facilitate trade in general ... so this is quite an important agreement," he said.
As a first step toward a free-trade area, ASEAN and China signed an agreement on trade in goods in November 2004.
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