Toward Economic Cooperation

A significant step toward the economic integration of Asia was taken in Tokyo last Thursday, as the Asian Development Bank held its inaugural meeting. More than 500 delegates from 32 countries and nine international agen cies, including financial experts, ranking world bankers and top-level govern ment officials such as U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Fowler, unanimously elected Japan's Takeshi Watanabe, 60, president for a five-year term. At the same time, they also agreed to admit Indonesia and Switzerland as the bank's 31st and 32nd members.

Watanabe, a former executive director of the World Bank and the Inter national Monetary Fund and for 20 years a Japanese Finance Ministry official, stressed that politics would not play a role in granting loans to under developed Asian countries. "I believe," he said, "that we will get along very well on the basis that economic development benefits everybody." He assured the assembled monetary experts that "soft" loans for financially insecure borrowers would be available through special funds administered by the bank. And he emphasized the bank's basically Asian character. Of the $1 billion in capital funds that will eventually be at the bank's disposal, the U.S. and Japan are the largest contributors: $200 million each. But 60% of the funds come from 19 Far Eastern countries, and both the president and seven of ten directors are from that region.

The bank will open in rented quarters in Manila on Dec. 19, begin full-time operations by early next year. Construction of a permanent Manila headquarters, now in the design stage, is expected to begin by mid-1967.

The Yellow Rolls-Royce. The inauguration of the ADB took place one week after the start of the first Asian Inter national Trade Fair in Bangkok. Set up by the Thais, but nursed to fruition by the same Bangkok-based U.N. Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East that inspired the formation of the ADB, the fair opened with Thailand's King Bhumibol Adulyadej releasing 2,509 pigeons -- one for each year of the Buddhist era. The King then joined his beautiful wife, Queen Sirikit, for a swing through 250 acres of fairgrounds in a yellow Rolls-Royce.

Some 3,000 corporations from within and without Asia set up exhibits and began bargaining at Bangkok, but the fair's main purpose is to stimulate trade, even among sometimes warring Asian nations. Included in their offerings: electrical and telephone equipment from India, machine tools and transistor radios from Pakistan, tires and tex tiles from South Korea, lacquerware handicrafts from South Viet Nam, cigarettes from Laos and air conditioners from Hong Kong.

Despite all the proud displays, a meaningful volume of intra-Oriental trade still remains a vision of the future. But the fair and the new Asian Development Bank could, as Japan's Premier Eisaku Sato put it at the ADB inaugural, mark the "opening of a new era in the history of Asia."

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