Backgrounder: Greater Mekong Subregion Summit

BEIJING, March 31 (Xinhua) -- Prime ministers of the six countries sharing the Mekong River gathered in Vientiane, the capital of Laos, Monday for the Third Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) Summit.

During the meeting, leaders from the GMS members -- Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam -- and representatives from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) will discuss programs to promote economic, social, cultural, tourism and environmental cooperation within the region.

They will also discuss coordinated actions to reduce poverty and promote sustainable development for all the countries and people of the GMS by enhancing connectivity and competitiveness and promoting an increased sense of community.

The greater Mekong subregion has a combined land area of nearly2.3 million square km and a population of more than 250 million.

Initiated by the ADB, the GMS members have embarked on a cooperation program in a bid to improve economic and social development in the region by reinforcing economic links between the six countries along the Lancang-Mekong River.

By the end of last year, the project-oriented cooperation mechanism had launched 180 projects in the fields of traffic, energy resources, telecommunications, environment protection, human resources development, investment, trade, tourism and agriculture, attracting more than 10 billion U.S. dollars of investment.

The GMS mechanism has also identified 11 "flagship programs," of which the most visible is the development of three economic corridors across the six member countries with proposed road routes stretching from north to south and east to west, as well as in the southern areas.

The summit meeting is the supreme decision-making organ of the GMS mechanism and is held once every three years, with the six member nations playing host in turn according to the alphabetic order of the country names.

The first GMS summit was held in Cambodia's capital of Phnom Penh in 2002, and the second in Kunming, southwestern China, in 2005.