The government controls the pace of liberalisation.
A Commons committee pointed out in a report published earlier this year that the pace of liberalisation of European postal services is set to accelerate.
So far, ministers have stuck to the line that gas is a privately run business and that government interference is the last thing industry needs (although they have grumbled about the glacial pace of liberalisation in the European markets on which Britain will increasingly rely).
In poorer countries the pace of economic liberalisation makes matters worse.
From China's perspective, the meltdown vindicates the cautious pace of its liberalisation.
More equity financing is needed to diversify the mix of corporate funding, and to take the pressure off a banking system that is weighed down by dud loans.Second, it could slow the pace of financial liberalisation.
The pace of trade liberalisation and deregulation, which helped productivity growth in the 1990s, has also slowed, if it has not reversed.If labour productivity growth in the non-farm business sector is 2%, that would still be a worthwhile improvement on previous decades.
The issue is not just the pacing and sequencing of liberalisation, as some suggest; the end result also matters.
The proposed free-trade area, after all, would be the world's biggest, with some 1.7 billion consumers.The hope is that the benefits of even the initial "early harvest" of Chinese tariff cuts to be announced in Phnom Penh will inspire ASEAN to redouble the pace of integration and trade liberalisation.
Our unemployment rate has been relatively high, but our misery index calculated by adding the inflation rate to the unemployment rate was the second-lowest amongst the four.Our problem is that we have made insufficient progress in terms of liberalisation, and the pace of our industrial restructuring has been too slow.
However, the pace of change depended not only on the progress of liberalisation itself, but also on the diverse socio-economic conditions in the individual countries.
