Asia-Europe summit shows power shifting east: David Miliband

LONDON: The 43-nation Asia Europe Meeting (ASEM), which wound up in Beijing on Saturday, showed that economic power has shifted from the West to the East, said British Foreign Secretary David Miliband.

In the Chinese capital, leaders called for an overhaul of the world's financial mechanisms and discussed climate change and energy security.

"I don't think it's just the fact that we are meeting in The Great Hall of the People and we listened to the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party talking about the need to prop up global capital markets that brings home to one that there is this big shift in economic power," Miliband told BBC radio from Beijing.

"But what is also clear is that there's been an increase in economic vulnerability: the Pakistani prime minister (Yousuf Raza Gilani) was here talking about how his country is now threatened with an economic tsunami."

The ASEM which was set up in 1996 as a potential counter for Europe to strong US influence in Asia.

Miliband said the meeting produced "renewed commitment to multilateral co-operation, deeper multilateral co-operation, above all in the area of financial regulation."

He said Asian countries were not blaming the West for the financial crisis, insisting there was a shared commitment to resolving it.

"There are deeper imbalances in the world economy that need to be addressed and that actually are part of the global economic downturn," he said.

"It's not just a financial problem we've got; it's a more fundamental issue of economic imbalance."