JCC may permit other countries in CPEC projects

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan and China have decided to consider establishment of joint working group in upcoming Joint Cooperation Committee (JCC) next week at Beijing under CPEC for devising mechanism to grant permission to other countries involvement into different projects.

“The upcoming JCC will consider establishment of new working group for seeking international cooperation for CPEC projects on December 20, 2018 in Beijing,” China’s Ambassador in Pakistan Yao Jing confirmed to The News after addressing PIDE conference here on Friday.

To another query about increasing possibility of size of CPEC projects into upcoming JCC meeting, the Ambassador said that different projects would be considered but there was no need to analyse mutual cooperation in the context of figures only. When asked about finalisation of Mainline (ML-1) project to upgrade rail line from Peshawar to Karachi, he said the design and financing modalities would be considered to ascertain that how much financing would be done by both the countries.

Earlier, in his address the Ambassador said the CPEC was focused on economy and there was need to avoid politicization of the CPEC. “The CPEC is regional cooperation project,” he said and added that the coming JCC at Beijing would consider seeking approval of international cooperation framework to involve third party countries into CPEC projects. The CPEC, he said, would provide benefits to all with far reaching impacts. He emphasised upon the need for devising plans carefully and then execute all projects to maximise benefits for all parties concerned.

Guntur Sugiyarto, Principal Economist of Asian Development Bank (ADB) said the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) was going to open up linkages for landlocked countries especially up to Central Asian Republics (CARs). “Pakistan possessed golden opportunity to become part of global supply chain with the help of CPEC and CAREC through establishing regional linkages,” he added. He said that Pakistan was making efforts to establish nine Special Economic Zones (SEZs) as he became amazed to witness progress achieved by China on account of establishing SEZs at Shanghai and other parts of China.

However, he reminded that the failure of SEZs was quite huge and stated that the failure rate stood at 77 percent in China and other parts of the world so there was need to analyse the capacity of Indonesia or Pakistan for establishing SEZs with all facilities and then to run it successfully. The success rate of SEZs was just standing at 23 percent keeping in view international experience.

“The ADB has prepared framework for making special economic zones successful,” he said and added that the state of the art infrastructure, right kind of incentives and other pre-requisites could play an important role for making such endeavors successful.

Other experts on this occasion asked Islamabad to get advantage of CPEC by expanding its GDP size in years to come by ensuring effective implementation instead of becoming talker because if this opportunity was lost it would never come again in several years to come. They recommended to the government to overcome balance of payment crisis and made all out efforts to learn from Chinese experience to jack up its share in international trade by adopting right kind of policies.