"The signing of an ECFA will help prevent Taiwan from being marginalized when new economic blocs in Southeast Asia take shape," Ma said during a meeting at the Presidential Office with members of the Council for Industrial and Commercial Development, Republic of China.
An ECFA is vital to Taiwan's economic development and ECFA negotiations are urgently needed for Taiwan because China has entered free trade framework agreements with 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), a pact that is expected to come into effect Jan.1, 2010, Ma noted.
The ASEAN Plus One free trade agreement will have a tremendous impact on Taiwan and might cripple the country's trade-dependent economy, Ma said.
Ma said that since he took office a year ago, the two sides of the Taiwan Strait have signed nine agreements and reached one consensus to "compensate for what we have not done over the past 10 years."
He added that since mechanisms governing tariff regimes and trade exchanges across the Taiwan Strait are non-existent as a result of the political impasse over the past several years, the signing of a cross-strait ECFA is imperative, as it could help normalize cross-strait trade relations.
The president further predicted that Taiwan is about to bottom out from the worst economic quagmire it has yet experienced and that he is fully confident in the country's economic potential.
