On ASEAN, there is broad agreement on two points. First, effective economic integration in ASEAN has serious potential. Second, ASEAN has so far failed to realize much of this potential, despite ambitious roadmaps. Consequently, business confidence in ASEAN as a region is starting to erode. Valuable opportunities to enable resilient and sustainable value chains in the region are thereby lost.
To realize the potential of ASEAN in practise, however, it is essential to collect input from multinational businesses operating in Asia. They are, after all, vital end users of the ASEAN internal market.
For this reason CompaRe, the Leiden Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence, in collaboration with PWC and the EU-ASEAN Business Council, organized a round table in Singapore to harvest the experiences and ideas of some of the largest multinationals operating in ASEAN. Together with experts from the National University of Singapore, the Singapore Management University and Leiden University, business representatives met in Singapore on 23 November 2023.
This round table kicked-off a broader collaboration between academia, MNC's operating in Asia, and ASEAN regulators inducing the ASEAN Development Bank which aims to identify areas where ASEAN can provide the most economic benefit in the short to medium term, and the measures ASEAN can realistically take and implement to realize this benefit.
