fast-growing markets in Asia, United States President Barack Obama, has said that the US is in the Pacific region to stay and that both sides will benefit from stronger trade relationships, the Associated Press reported on Saturday.
On a mission to help create jobs at home, Obama noted that while US exports to the region had increased by more than 60 per cent in the last five years, competition had cut into the US share of trade in the region.
The US President declared in a speech on Saturday at a regional economic summit, “We want to change that.”
The president hopes to double US exports within five years and views selling more goods to Asians as one way to help meet that goal while simultaneously creating and sustaining jobs for Americans. India, the first of four countries Obama visited this week and a booming nation to boot, has a population of more than one billion people.
Obama also said healthy competition needn‘t rupture relationships between and among nations.
He added, ”There‘s no need to view trade, commerce or economic growth as zero-sum games.
”If we work together, and act together, strengthening our economic ties can be a win-win for all of our nations.”
Obama was blunt about his reason for touring Asia this week.
According to him, ”For America, this is a job strategy.”
Obama said before rattling off numbers showing that every $1bn in exports supports 5,000 jobs at home, the flood of US goods to Asia-Pacific nations would give those consumers, many of whom are enjoying higher standards of living, more options to choose from when they go shopping.
”We are invested in your success because it‘s connected to our own. We have a stake in your future because our destiny is shared,” Obama said.
”It was a Japanese poet who said, ‘Individually, we are one drop. ‘Together, we are an ocean.‘ So it must be with the billions of people whose lives are linked in the swirling currents of the Pacific,” he added.
Obama‘s speech to a gathering of business leaders at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum came on his first full day in Japan and followed a divisive Group of 20 nations economic summit in Seoul, South Korea.
There, Obama failed to win backing from other world leaders for a get-tough policy toward China over its currency stance and he missed his own goal for reaching agreement with longtime ally South Korea on a new free-trade pact.
Despite those setbacks and the election fallout at home, administration officials portrayed the trip as a success from Obama‘s engagement with the region‘s people to billions of dollars in contracts to help on the jobs front at home.
“If you look at the sweep of this trip from the first day in Mumbai to today in Japan, I think that the United States has dramatically advanced its critical goals and its strategic interest in the region,” Tom Donilon, Obama‘s national security adviser, told reporters Saturday.
Obama would attend more APEC meetings on Sunday, the 10th and final day of a four-country journey that has taken him from the Indian cities of Mumbai and New Delhi, to Jakarta, Indonesia, where he lived for several years as a boy, to Seoul and finally Japan. It is his longest trip abroad as president.
Obama also planned a one-on-one breakfast meeting Sunday with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. One expected topic of discussion is a stalled nuclear arms reduction between the countries. Obama also was stopping at the Great Buddha statue, which he visited as a child, before boarding Air Force One for the long flight to Washington.
Obama started the Asia tour immediately after suffering a political battering in elections at home, as Republicans recaptured the House and significantly cut the Democratic majority in the Senate.
Source:http://www.punchng.com/Articl.aspx?theartic=Art201011151563748
No comments:
Post a Comment