I am informed that there is a resource person from Ghana who will be able to shed more light on this matter. In New Zealand, the development of the financial literacy strategy was led by the Retirement Commission which was mandated by a broader group at a symposium on financial literacy. There appears to have been no contestation by other regulators, possibly because there was high level involvement. The examples I have outlined above indicate how successful or otherwise the strategy development process can be. However, a common feature for successful strategy development among all the above processes is the multi-partner consultative process. Mr. Chairman, in recognising the critical role played by various stakeholders, the Bank of Zambia believes that a multi-partner stakeholder process is the most appropriate for Zambia, as it would enable greater mobilization of stakeholders and resources for the promotion of financial literacy in the country. The Bank of Zambia, will therefore, provide the initial leadership but it will be critical for all stakeholders to support, and buy-in into the strategy development process. Ladies and Gentlemen, the tremendous support of the various stakeholders to the agenda of the FSDP cannot go un-noticed. The technical and financial support provided by a number of our development partners including the Swedish Government, the Finnish Government, the World Bank, IMF, DFID, the United States Treasury and First Initiative, and now the Financial Education Fund have gone a long way in slowly making this vision a reality.
With this regard, we need to further promote financial cooperation and more trade and investment facility arrangements such as today’s initiative. Ladies and gentlemen, 9. I would like to emphasize that there are still untapped opportunities abound along the whole spectrum of exchanges and cooperation between Thailand and China. As to give you food for thought, the followings, are a few examples. Firstly, regional supply chain network. Our region has already been regarded as high quality and cost-effective production bases. However, there is still gap to be filled and opportunity to be grasped. Since many economies in the region are not well integrated into the regional production networks. According to the latest World Bank’s Trading Cross Borders indicator which measures the time and cost of trading across borders, the newer member of ASEAN all score well below the ASEAN average. This is mainly due to the huge gaps in infrastructure. 10. Here, we can narrow the gap by mobilizing our region’s abundant financial resources into infrastructure investment. In this regard, China plays a strategic role in the progression of infrastructure development in our region. The improved infrastructure will allow regional economies at various stages of development to participate in regional production networks in line with their evolving comparative advantage. Infrastructure investment is costly but it is worth the expense. 11. Secondly, research and technical development. Although China has emerged into the world centre stage in just recent decades, China is now a world class technology lab who owns the broad range of advanced technologies.