Experts call for SCO financing mechanism

Economic cooperation under the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is insufficient compared with security cooperation, Chinese and Russian experts said, calling for a financing mechanism among SCO members.

Economic cooperation among SCO member states is lagging behind the cooperation in security, said Shi Ze, an expert on Eurasian studies with the China Institute of International Studies. He was speaking at a news briefing held by Russian Information Agency Novosti on Wednesday.

China and Russia have financing resources but there is no integrated cooperation system, said Sergey Luzyanin, deputy director with the institute of Far Eastern studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences, at the briefing.

“When coming to the issue of economic cooperation, there are the problems of how to coordinate and balance the interest of different countries and different enterprises,” said Luzyanin.

Compared with cooperation in other sectors, the issue of economic cooperation among SCO members is more complicated and the most difficult to promote, he added.

SCO members stand in different periods of economic development and they have different ideas of how to use the capital, said Guan Guihai, associate dean of the School of International Studies at Peking University.

SCO members should be more creative regarding economic cooperation among its members, Shi said.

Agreeing with Shi, Alexander Lukin, director of the Center for East Asian and Shanghai Cooperation Organization Studies at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, said the SCO should build a financing mechanism among all SCO member states.