Phnom Penh, October 11, 2018 —
Samdech Akka Moha Sena Padei Techo Hun Sen, Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Cambodia, and other ASEAN leaders gathered in Bali, Indonesia this afternoon in the ASEAN Leaders’ Gathering.
UN secretary-general, ASEAN secretary-general, IMF managing director, and World Bank Group president were also present at the event held under the theme “Achieving SDGs and Overcoming Development Gap through Regional and Global Collaborative Actions”.
According to the Cambodian Premier’s official Facebook page, in his keynote address, Samdech Techo Hun Sen highlighted key potentials, challenges and opportunities of the ASEAN region, and encouraged ASEAN to further tighten its cooperation with existing partners, restore global trading system based on international laws, and continue the integration on connectivity in all areas in order to strengthen ASEAN’s resilience in response to the political, economic and social developments.
For Cambodia, Samdech Techo Hun Sen said, the country has achieved a high annual economic growth of 7.7 percent on average in over the past two decades, and maintained well the strong macroeconomic and financial stability.
With this high economic performance, he added, Cambodia has recently become a lower middle-income economy. Poverty rate has been dropped to only 10 percent and the income gap is maintained at a low level through the distribution of the benefits of growth to the entire population.
In addition, Cambodia has achieved social indicators in education and health sectors before the set timing, he continued.
Samdech Techo Prime Minister also shared Cambodia’s aim of getting an upper middle-income status by 2030. To reach the target, the Kingdom has been paying attention to creating employment opportunities for the youths, promoting the quality of key public services, including infrastructure, education, health services and other basic services, especially to ensuring balance and narrowing the gap between urban and rural areas, continuing to expand both hard and soft connectivity as well as accelerating economic integration in the country, the region and the world.
In this context, he underlined, the Royal Government of Cambodia has given high priority to the reforms to promote inclusive growth through acceleration of necessary structural reforms to increase competitiveness and boost diversification, including reduction of energy costs, enhancement of transport connectivity and resolution of the gap of skills through the improvement of the quality of education and technical and vocational training by increasing investment in young people to grasp opportunities of demographic excellence and maintaining the labour force.
Financial technology, further amelioration of business environment, augmentation of investments and credits on research and development were also mentioned by Samdech Techo Hun Sen on the occasion.
By Khan Sophirom, AKP
