Asean creates unified economic community

ASEAN Leaders from left to right, Philippines’ President Benigno Aquino III, Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo, Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen, Brunei’s Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, Laos’ Prime Minister Thongsing Thammavong, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung, Thailand’s Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-o-cha, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and Myanmar’s President Thein Sein pose for photographs during opening ceremony of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Saturday, Nov. 21, 2015. (AP Photo/Vincent Thian)

KUALA LUMPUR—Thirteen years after mooting the idea, Southeast Asian leaders on Sunday formally created a unified economic community in a region more populous and diverse than both the European Union and North America, and one that hopes to compete with China and India.

The 10 leaders in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) signed a declaration during their summit establishing the Asean Economic Community (AEC), as part of a larger Asean Community that aims for political, security, cultural and social integration.

The summit’s host, Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia, hailed the Asean Community as a “landmark achievement,” and urged members to accelerate integration. “The region is primed to expand exponentially,” he said.

In his opening speech at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Center, Philippine President Benigno S. Aquino III said the establishment of the Asean Community “signals to the world that a stronger Asean will be an enduring mainstream built on solidarity and communal progress.”

The AEC is already a reality and many of its fundamentals have been applied in the region, including the removal of tariff barriers and visa restrictions. It has also led to greater political and cultural cooperation.

The AEC will bolster income and employment, and provide the region with stronger economic muscle in facing the other giants, said Michael G. Plummer, a professor of international economics at the Europe Center of Johns Hopkins University, based in Bologna, Italy.

“Asean integration will help balance the economic power of China and India,” Plummer said. “Individually, Asean countries are, perhaps, too small to be important players in the economic and security game, but as an integrated group of more than half a billion people, they would be in the major league.”

A long way to go

But there is a long way to go before the AEC becomes fully functional after becoming a legal entity on Dec. 31. The region’s diversity can sometimes be a hindrance.

Asean has 630 million people, speaking different languages, following various faiths and governed by various systems, including rambunctious democracies, a military dictatorship, quasi-civilian, authoritarian, monarchy and communism.

“The AEC is arguably the most ambitious economic integration program in the developing world,” Plummer said. “But implementation of the AEC is increasingly uphill. Much remains to be done and the region faces many challenges in finishing. The AEC is a process.”

It falls short in more politically sensitive areas such as opening up agriculture, steel, auto production and other protected sectors.

Asean citizens will be allowed to work in other countries in the region, but they will be limited to jobs in eight sectors, including engineering, accountancy and tourism.

This accounts for only 1.5 percent of the total jobs in the region, and host countries still can put up constitutional and regulatory hurdles restricting the inflow of talent.

Intraregional trade has remained at around 24 percent of Asean’s total global trade for the last decade, far lower than 60 percent in the European Union.

Diplomatic rows

Asean members are also struggling to resolve diplomatic flare-ups among each other, such as border disputes between Cambodia and Vietnam, or Indonesia’s inability to fight annual forest fires that spew noxious haze for months over Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand.

Plummer said progress had been slow in services liberalization. Cross-border flow of investment is also restricted by large exclusion lists and caps on foreign ownership. Government procurement and curbing monopolies by state-owned enterprises are highly sensitive and untouched, he said.

Although the four poorer economies—Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam—have until 2018 to bring down tariffs, economic integration could further reinforce income equalities in the region, he said.

The AEC “is not the finished article. Neither is it officially claimed to be. There is much work to be done,” said Mohamad Munir Abdul Majid, chair of a council that advises Asean on business matters.

“There is a disparity between what is officially recorded as having been achieved … and what the private sector reports as their experience,” Majid added.

Other hurdles

There are also other hurdles, such as corruption, uneven infrastructure and unequal costs of transportation and shipping.

A wide economic gulf divides Southeast Asia’s rich and middle-income economies—Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei, Thailand and the Philippines—and its four less developed members—Burma, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.

The AEC was envisaged in 2002—and a blueprint was created in 2007—to face competition from China and India for market share and investments. While China’s economic growth is expected to slow to an average of 6 percent annually over the next five years, India’s expansion is likely to pick up to 7.3 percent in the same period, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.   Reports from AP and Dona Z. Pazzibugan