UN Newservice
2 August -- Amid renewed financial anxiety throughout Asia, the President of Indonesia today told a high-level United Nations finance meeting that securing a common identity for Asians was the key to solving the continent's development problems.
Opening the High-Level Regional Consultative Meeting on Financing for Development in Jakarta, Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid urged solidarity among the region's countries so that "we can then tackle problems with our heads held high."
The four-day conference, which has attracted over 152 delegates from 37 countries, as well as the representatives of financial institutions, UN entities and non-governmental organizations, is covering a wide range of issues that include trade, capital flows, development assistance, national external debt and financial structure issues.
"Although it has taken almost seven years of negotiations to hold this meeting, it is encouraging to see the beginning of the process with an emphasis on the multi-dimensional problems facing developing countries in their efforts to integrate themselves into the mainstream of the international economic system," said Makarim Wibisono, President of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), who is Indonesia's Permanent Representative to the UN in New York.
Rubens Ricupero, Secretary-General of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), stressed that promoting complementarity, stability and appropriate burden-sharing in financial arrangements at all levels should be an important objective of future reform efforts in the area of money and finance.
For his part, Under-Secretary-General Nitin Desai, head of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, emphasized that development was a joint public and private sector responsibility, and domestic resources -- both public and private -- continued to play a critical role in financing national development. The meeting, part of a series of five regional consultations leading up to a global meeting on Financing for Development next year, was mandated by the UN General Assembly to involve policymakers at the ministerial level or higher to consider issues related to the availability of resources for development.:
