[eChapters]Realizing the ASEAN Economic Community: A Comprehensive Assessment (Introduction)

The ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) constitutes the most ambitious programme of economic cooperation in the developing world. Its goal is to create no less than a free flow of goods, services, foreign direct investment, and skilled labour, as well as a freer flow of capital, throughout the region. Implementing this agenda will be technically and politically difficult. Hence, understanding the potential economic "payoff" is of the essence.The goal of this book is to assess empirically the likely economic effects of the AEC on the ASEAN Member States and associated stakeholders. It mobilizes a number of techniques to do so, and finds that the likely effects will be large, even greater than the anticipated effects of the Single Market Program in Europe, for example. The AEC will help the region improve competitiveness, facilitate the creation of production networks, foster the diffusion of "best practices", and help ASEAN project its interests more effectively in an increasingly integrated, global economy.