ASEAN trade deal proves elusive
24 June 2004
China and its Southeast Asian trade partners will probably miss the June 30 deadline for deciding which goods to liberalize in a new free-trade agreement, Ong Keng Yong, secretary-general of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), said. An agreement would be one more step toward establishing the world's largest free trade zone. An ASEAN-China FTZ would create a market of nearly 2 billion people and a gross GDP of US$2 trillion.