KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia, together with the other Asean members and China, Japan and South Korea, have signed the Asean+3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO) agreement at the margin of IMF/World Bank group annual meetings in Washington.
Deputy Finance Minister Datuk Chua Tee Yong signed the agreement on behalf of Malaysia.
The Ministry Finance said the Asean+3 finance ministers and central bank governors reached consensus on the draft of the agreement to institutionalise AMRO as an international organisation at the 17th meeting in May last year.
“Since then, member countries have taken necessary steps for the signing of this agreement,” the ministry said in a statement today.
AMRO was established in Singapore as a company limited by guarantee in April 2011 by Asean+3 countries as an independent regional surveillance unit to monitor and analyse regional economies and support Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralisation (CMIM) decision-making.
The CMIM is a multilateral currency swap arrangement among Asean+3 members, which became effective on March 24, 2010, having developed from the CMI bilateral swap network.
The initiative core objectives is to address actual and potential balance of payments and/or short-term liquidity difficulties in the Asean+3 region and supplementing the existing international financial arrangements, with a total financial support size of US$240 billion. – BERNAMA