Publication

In light of ASEAN’s plans to establish the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) at the end of 2015, this paper argues that though the idea of this arrangement is to produce economic integration, this will elude the organizations' members for the foreseeable future. The author suggests that the reasons for this potentially include 1) the plan's overly ambitious timescale; 2) the mismatch between the ambitions for the project and the political will to carry it out; 3) the extent of economic and political diversity in the region; 4) the relatively small scale of the ASEAN market in comparison to external ones, and the orientation of countries in the organization towards an external market. Finally, he asks the question of whether the ASEAN region, giving its diversity and outward orientation, even needs increased economic integration.