May 2016 ~ MYANMAR TRADE OFFICE (TAIPEI)

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Publication of Burma General Licenses, Burma Removals, and Burma Designations

U.S. Department of the Treasury

Today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) amended the Burmese Sanctions Regulations, 31 C.F.R. part 537 (“the Regulations”), and updated the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (SDN) List. Specifically, OFAC issued regulatory amendments intended to support trade with Burma; facilitate the movement of goods within Burma; allow certain transactions related to U.S. individuals residing in Burma; and allow most transactions involving designated financial institutions. In addition, OFAC, in consultation with the Department of State, removed seven state-owned enterprises and three state-owned banks from the SDN List.

“Burma reached a historic milestone over the last year by holding competitive elections and peacefully transitioning to a democratically-elected government. Our actions today demonstrate our strong support for this political and economic progress while continuing to pressure designated persons in Burma to change their behavior,” said Adam J. Szubin, Acting Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. “These steps will help to facilitate trade with non-sanctioned businesses and, in turn, help the people and Government of Burma achieve a more inclusive and prosperous future.”

Source:U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control

US business delegation to meet with Myanmar Government

AMCHAM Myanmar had the opportunity to welcome U.S. Ambassador to Myanmar Scot Marciel at a luncheon at Park Royal Hotel Yangon on April 7. Photo: AMCHAM Myanmar

The American Chamber of Commerce in Myanmar is organizing a delegation of American businesses to meet with the newly elected government in Nay Pyi Taw on May 17 and 18.

Led by US Ambassador to Myanmar, Mr Scot Marciel, the delegation will discuss ways to improve the Myanmar business environment and bring in more US direct investment into the country, according to a press release on May 13.

Delegates from 30 US companies, members of AMCHAM Myanmar, will meet with various Ministries and urge them to continue to make positive legal and policy steps further fostering economic growth that began under the previous government. The delegation will advocate for strengthening the legal framework for foreign ownership and business protection, the rule of law, improving infrastructure and services to support economic growth, and leveling the playing field for all business – private, state-owned, foreign and domestic.

“The American Chamber of Commerce in Myanmar and the American business community here would like to see the country develop and thrive, and spurring the economy and creating jobs is essential to that process. As the Myanmar government is committed to creating a business environment benefitting both investors and the people of Myanmar by improving infrastructure and rule of law, while strengthening its leadership development, AMCHAM is at the government’s disposal to provide advice, expertise, and support in bringing Myanmar’s economic climate in line with international standards and best practices making it a friendlier environment for investors,” says Andrew Lee, Chief Country Representative for GE and member of AMCHAM Myanmar’s Executive Committee.

The visit to the new government comes on the heels of a business matching programme held by AMCHAM Myanmar in conjunction with the Myanmar Federation of Chambers of Commerce in February. More than 20 U.S. companies, such as Ford Motor Company, Dow Chemical, DuPont and Honeywell, networked and fostered partnerships with 50 local businessmen.
According to the Directorate of Investment and Company Administration, 17 U.S. projects worth US$248 million have been approved as of the beginning of this year, which signals an increased commitment and increased role of American business in Myanmar.

Credit: Mizzima

မြန်မာနိုင်ငံ ဆီထွက်သီးနှံကဏ္ဍ ပို့ကုန်ဝင်ငွေတိုးမြှင့်ရေးအတွက် အစားအစာလုံခြုံစိတ်ချမှုရှိရေးနှင့်အပင်ပိုးမွှားကင်းရှင်းရေးအစီအမံများ ဆိုင်ရာ(SPS) စီမံကိန်း

မြန်မာနိုင်ငံ ဆီထွက်သီးနှံကဏ္ဍ ပို့ကုန်ဝင်ငွေတိုးမြှင့်ရေးအတွက် အစားအစာလုံခြုံစိတ်ချမှုရှိရေးနှင့်အပင်ပိုးမွှားကင်းရှင်းရေးအစီအမံများ ဆိုင်ရာ(SPS) စီမံကိန်း 2016ခုုနှစ်၊ ဧပြီလ 3 ရက်

ASEAN research office to support Myanmar statistics

Myanmar will soon have another source of support in its efforts to better track economic data and foreign direct investment, when an ASEAN+3 research arm starts a new technical assistance program later this year.

The ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO) was set up as a private company in Singapore in 2011, but became an international organisation jointly owned by the member states in February this year, Nomura Munenari, senior operations officer, told The Myanmar Times.

The member states, which include Myanmar, approved a technical assistance framework in April which will rely on voluntary contributions for funding, Mr Munenari said.

“So if the Myanmar authorities request an expert on balance of payments statistics we will find one using the voluntary funds,” he said.

AMRO will concentrate initially on balance of payments assistance because potential recipients identified it as an area of focus during an “informal sounding-out”, Mr Munenari said.

The balance of payments records international transactions across a country’s public and private sector, allowing it to monitor a national deficit or surplus and keep track of how much foreign direct investment is flowing into the country.

In many countries, the central bank contributes to balance of payments data by monitoring the banking system to track the flow of public and private investment coming into and out of the country.

But the Central Bank of Myanmar is unable to monitor such FDI flows, officials at the Directorate of Investment and Company Administration (DICA) have said.

Approved FDI reached more than US$9 billion in the financial year ending March 31, and DICA officials say they plan to track the level of actual foreign investment from 2017.

Better balance of payments data would help Myanmar track foreign investment, Mr Munenari said.

One of AMRO’s key roles is to help its members decide whether or not to make use of a multi-currency swap agreement between the ASEAN+3 countries.

This facility allows a country facing balance of payments problems to swap its local currency for US dollars. AMRO’s task is to monitor balance of payments data to determine whether the swap facility is required and the necessary amounts, Mr Munenari said.

Myanmar runs a current account deficit, which the IMF expects to fall from 8.9pc of GDP in 2015-16 to 8.3pc in 2016-17.

No country has yet had to make use of the swap facility, Mr Munenari said.

Credit:MMTIMES

Thilawa shares ready for launch

Thilawa Special Economic Zone Public Company will start selling its shares at Yangon Stock Exchange (YSE) next week, according to the Myanmar Securities Exchange Supervisory Commission.

Of six listed companies, First Myanmar Investment is the first company to sell its shares and Thilawa SEZ is the second.

Dr Maung Maung Thein, chair of the commission, said: “It is estimated that Thilawa SEZ has fixed Friday of the last week of April for its inception. FMI will continue selling its shares.”

Source: Eleven Weekly Media