HANOI STATEMENT

BY VIETNAM-JAPAN EMERGING RESEARCHERS' FORUM

Exploring New Initiatives for Vietnam-Japan Cooperation amidst Uncertainties in Asia-Pacific Economic Integration

Today on 27th of October 2017, we—experts, scholars and researchers from Vietnam and Japan with keen interest in promoting Asia-Pacific economic integration and Vietnam-Japan cooperation—gather in this Forum on "Exploring new initiatives for Vietnam-Japan cooperation amidst uncertainties in Asia-Pacific Economic Integration."

In this Forum, we recognized the changing landscape with emerging protectionism and anti-globalization sentiment, which exposes significant challenges to economic integration in the Asia-Pacific region. We are concerned that the on-going uncertainties surrounding such major initiatives as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) might increase in the absence of shared views and joint efforts to bring regional economic integration back on track.

In our discussion, we all acknowledged that Asia-Pacific economic integration would continue to benefit member economies including Vietnam and Japan. Our experiences in the past decades have shown that pro-active economic integration—via promoting foreign trade, foreign direct investment and evolvement of production networks—has been instrumental in helping drive domestic economic reforms, enhance efficiency of resource allocation and, in turn, deliver achievements in terms of economic growth and poverty reduction. Regional and domestic concerns about unequitable access to emerging opportunities and benefits should only require adaptation of, rather than reversing, Asia-Pacific economic integration. Realizing quick benefits from existing integration arrangements, such as the TPP, is more important than awaiting larger values from bigger trade pacts which necessarily require more time. In addition, enlivening the existing integration arrangements helps retain the possibility of achieving a broader liberalization framework for the Asia-Pacific region.

We therefore recommend that the authorities of Vietnam and Japan continue working— jointly and with other relevant partners—to retain and promptly build on the hard-earned progress in existing economic integration initiatives such as the TPP and RCEP. More specifically, we recommend that:

· Vietnam and Japan express further support and make relevant efforts to promptly conclude the TPP with remaining 11 members, based on the final text of TPP signed in February 2016 with minimal revisions;

· Vietnam and Japan work more closely with other partners to reach an agreement on remaining issues under the RCEP, including market access; and

· Vietnam and Japan continue a series of dialogue and cooperation, both bilaterally and in multilateral fora (such as APEC), to enhance mutual understanding and joint capacity to promote regional economic integration initiatives.

The fulltext of  Hanoi Statement:  Hanoi Statement_27 October 2017.docx

Source: Vietnam Economic Portal, VNEP.