The original target date of 2020 was advanced to 2015 this year. Obviously, there are practical difficulties of integration given the diversity in the region and the different levels of development. ASEAN leaders have tasked an Eminent Persons Group to come up with an ASEAN Charter to guide ASEAN's future development. This will mark a new phase of deeper ASEAN integration. Geo-strategic shifts The re-emergence of India and China, and the revitalisation of ASEAN are taking place within a broader geo-strategic context. Let me now examine some of the larger trends. At one level, Asia is slowly but surely coalescing. The entire region is being sewn together by changing patterns of trade, investment and production chains. Increasing economic integration is reflected by the rapid expansion of intra-Asia trade. From 34% in 1980, intra-Asian trade as a share of the region's total trade has grown to more than 50% in 2005. The transformations taking place in Asia are of a depth and scope historically unprecedented. The combined population of Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia and India is well over 3 billion, about half the world's population. Changes of the scale that are currently underway could be profoundly unsettling to international order. Strong growth will give Beijing and New Delhi the resources to pursue wider strategic interests across Asia and beyond. Strategic stability is not to be taken for granted, particularly in Asia where there are many territorial and other unresolved issues left over from historically complicated relationships. Great power competition and rivalry are facts of life.
The responses of central banks to the financial turmoil  Over the past four weeks – in particular following the collapse of Lehman Brothers – credit risk concerns have intensified and have led to additional disruptions in the functioning of money markets, not only in the United States, but also in the euro area and Europe in general. Central banks are taking all the necessary steps to stop the downward spiral, and recent actions have once again demonstrated their determination in this respect. In both “normal” and “turbulent” times, the primary objective of the Eurosystem’s open market operations is to keep the shorter rates, in particular, the overnight rate, as close as possible  BIS Review 123/2008  1  to the minimum bid rate. However, during the recent period of turbulence, open market operations have also aimed at ensuring the continued access of solvent banks to liquidity, notably by contributing to easing the impaired functioning of the money market. The Eurosystem intends to continue to follow this approach as long as necessary. From the first day of the financial market turbulence on 9 August 2007, in an environment of increased liquidity risk and in response to banks’ changed liquidity demand pattern, the ECB has achieved these objectives through making technical changes to the way in which it supplies liquidity in normal times, while also utilising the full latitude of its framework for monetary policy implementation.