ASEAN ECONOMIC COMMUNITY
What is ASEAN Economic Community (AEC)?
ASEAN signifies continuous economic growth among members. After the attempts to establish ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) have been achieved in 2003, the 8th ASEAN Summit in November 2002 agreed to set ASEAN direction towards ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), similar to that of the European Economic Community (EEC). At the same time, ASEAN members were encouraged to improve their internal performance towards a more efficient manner.
During the ASEAN Summit 2003, ASEAN Heads of States announced a statement called Bali Concord II, agreeing to move towards ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) by 2020. At the same time, it urged members to move towards free trade on 11 priority sectors of goods and services, including tourism, air travel, automotives, wood based products, rubber-based products, textiles and apparels, electronics, agro-based products, fisheries, IT technology (e-ASEAN) and healthcare.
AEC's Goal
ASEAN will move towards ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) by 2020 under the concept of being a single market and production base, indicating free moves of production materials and products to be manufactured elsewhere utilising resources of each country, including raw materials and joint labour forces under the same single standards of products, criteria, rules and regulations.
Directions towards becoming AEC
The establishment of AEC is a key challenge for Thailand for the next eight years. Thailand will need to prepare and get ready in a number of areas. The previous 15 years of experience in AFTA have been, to a certain level, successful, as far as the expanding volume of trades in ASEAN is concerned. However, investment has not been well achieved due to low level of investment both within and outside ASEAN.
Additionally, China and India are playing a key role in the region. They are considered quite a significant economic and investment