ACCRA Jamaal Williams Jersey , Feb. 3 (Xinhua) -- A seminar for local football administrators and officials to promote and market Ghana's top flight league opened here on Monday.

The two-day seminar, which is being sponsored by SuperSport, the television rights holders of the Ghana premier league, is expected to educate the league clubs and administrators on how to market the league to bring in more sponsors and generate more interest from local football fans.

All the chief executives of the 16 premier league clubs as well as members of the premier league Board and executive committee members of the Ghana Football Association (GFA) are attending the seminar.

The president of the GFA, Kwasi Nyantakyi, said the seminar was aimed at building the capacity of the clubs to be able to attract sponsorship.

"It is also to help us to promote our (Ghana's) premier league," he said while opening the seminar.

"We are very happy to have experts here to help us in attaining the requisite knowledge to help us enhance the league," said Nyantakyi, who is also an executive member of the Confederation of African Football (GAF).

The Ghana FA boss expressed his profound gratitude to SuperSport for organizing the event which he believed would go a long way to improve the local elite league.

South Africa's Stanley Matthews, one of the world's leading brains in football marketing and promotion, led the seminar, taking participants through various marketing strategies and how to make their clubs attractive to attract sponsorship.

SuperSport signed a three-year deal with the GFA last year for the national league and also the FA Cup.

It has also been producing the premier league and FA matches for television in line with various other leagues across Africa since 2013.

BOAO, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Regional economic integration in Asia is expected to deepen further as China moves up the international value chain despite weakening trade growth, experts who follow China's ongoing economic transition said on Tuesday.

"China's growing importance in the value chain will inevitably influence its economic and trade structures with these major economies (in Asia)," said Chen Lan, director of Deloitte Research at Deloitte China, in a report for the ongoing Boao Foroum for Asia in Hainan, China.

The report said that China's future industrial upgrade through innovation will enhance its position in the global value chain as rising production costs and labor costs in the country may weaken its position as the "world's factory."

"Despite slowed economic growth during the 13th Five-Year Plan, China still remains one of the most important global consumer markets," Chen wrote.

China is now in the middle of a painstaking transition from growth driven by investment and exports to growth led by consumption and the services sector. The official economic forecast for this year is between 6.5 percent and 7 percent, much slower than the wildly high growth rates of over 10 percent per annum a few years ago. Last year the economy grew by 6.9 percent.

China aims to double its per capita gross domestic product (GDP) by 2020 compared to 2010, a target that will catapult the world' s most populous country to the status of a relatively well-off society.

Speaking at a press conference in Boao on Tuesday, Justin Yifu Lin, former chief economist of the World Bank, said that he expects China' s economic growth to average around 6.5 percent over the next five years. Coupled with the expected appreciation of the yuan, this would mean China' s per capita GDP is likely to cross the mark of 12,000 U.S. dollars at around 2020.

Lin said the Chinese economy remains vigorous as China targets more sustainable and inclusive growth. According to a new index unveiled by his team to measure the inclusive structural transformation of different economies, China has a score that is among the highest worldwide. The index is based on the New Structural Economics advocated by Lin, who believes that structural changes are the foundation of sustained and inclusive growth along the path to development.

Experts at the forum highlighted the slowdown in world trade growth as a challenge for Asia. A report commissioned for the forum by a team led by Lin Guijun, a scholar from China's University of International Business and Economics, said that growth in Asia's merchandise trade has slowed in the aftermath of the global financial crisis since 2008 as world trade growth also slowed. Ditto for global GDP growth, a situation that has not been seen in decades, though trade growth in Asia remains far more robust than that of the rest of the world.

China is now the world's leading trader and occupies a key position in the international value chain as a manufacturing hub. It is a top trading partner for major economies including Japan, South Korea and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and has inked free trade agreements with the latter two.

Lin Guijun said that Asian economies have now placed more importance on the region' s services as global services grow quickly and investment flows increase.

More than 80 percent of the service-related free trade agreements signed by Asian countries focus on internal liberalizations, he said.

China has promised to further open up its economy while pursuing more sustainable and inclusive growth. It is relying on the services sector to get the medium-high growth it needs to achieve the important milestones in its economic development by 2020.

Chen said economic integration in Asia is set to deepen further as China keeps steadfast to the principle of opening-up, with initiatives like the Belt and Road Initiative helping to open up China's hinterlands through trade links covering land and sea.

This will help drive infrastructure demand from ASEAN members and in turn boost their economic development. While there are risks to the e.