A Forum for South East Asian Policy-Makers on Fossil-Fuel Subsidy Reform: Challenges and opportunities - Meeting Report
To help share experiences on the successes and challenges with fossil-fuel subsidy reform, the IISD's Global Subsidies Initiative (GSI) convened a two-day forum for policy-makers in South East Asia, entitled Fossil-Fuel Subsidy Reform: Challenges and Opportunities.
The event brought together high-level policy-makers from Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, as well as a number of international policy experts from organizations including the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the World Bank (WB).Forum discussions focused on key elements of a reform strategy: getting prices right; managing the impacts of reform; and consulting and communicating with stakeholders to build support for reform. The participants also discussed the role of international cooperation in helping to facilitate solutions at the national level. South East Asian countries have a wealth of experience to draw from, with many having partially removed subsidies during peak oil prices in 2008, and most already committed to developing and implementing reform plans.
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