Connect with us
//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

Asean

Australia needs to refocus on ASEAN

Published

on

Author: Gareth Evans, ANU

Things just haven’t clicked the way they should have in the Australian–ASEAN relationship. We seem far removed from the time when as Australia’s Foreign Minister I had no counterparts anywhere in the world with whom I felt more close and comfortable. And from when, at one of the Cambodian peace conferences, having stumbled inadvertently into an ASEAN foreign ministers’ coffee meeting, my apologies were waved aside with the words ‘Come on in. You’re one of us.’

Australia’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott holds hands ASEAN leaders during the ASEAN–Australia 40th Anniversary Commemorative Summit in Naypyitaw, Myanmar, 12 November 2014. (Photo: AAP).

These days it seems to me that ASEAN simply doesn’t feature as largely in Australia’s collective consciousness as it should or (Indonesia perhaps excepted) get the policy attention it should; Australian politicians don’t go out of their way to forge personal relationships with regional counterparts as they should; students don’t study the region’s languages anything like as much as they should, and indeed used to; and — compared to other countries — there is a really striking lack of Australian financial investment in the region.

Why is this the case?

It cannot be the diminished size or relevance of ASEAN for the Australian economy or its strategic decision-making. Australia’s two-way trade with the ASEAN bloc, with its 600 million people, is 15 per cent of the total, putting it second only to China, and well ahead of Japan and the US. Australia is the major provider of Western education to a number of countries in the region. Beyond economics, Australia has developed real intimacy in defence and police relations in many parts of the region, and continues to engage in an intense flurry of diplomatic activity. One reason ASEAN occupies less mental space of policymakers may be that there has been some degree of disappointment in the way that ASEAN as an institution has functioned. Another may be that China’s quite explosive rise has forced everyone to change their sense of relative geopolitical priorities.

But ASEAN still matters a lot geo-strategically for Australia. Its very existence – like that of the European Union – has been an extremely effective conflict prevention mechanism in a region whose previous volatility, and propensity for bloody interstate violence, seems to have been forgotten. When it comes to building effective regional security and economic dialogue and policymaking mechanisms, Australian policymakers have seen to their cost that irritation with ASEAN’s insistence on its centrality in these institutions is counterproductive. It may not make much rational sense to have all ten ASEAN states sitting at every major table when three or four would do, but it makes political sense to go with that flow.

This lesson was learned early on in constructing APEC, and working to build the ASEAN Regional Forum. But subsequent Australian Foreign Ministers have had to learn it the hard way. While the East Asia Summit has finally come together, it is still a work in progress. It is a leaders’ forum with the membership and mandate to be a really effective policy engine for the wider region.

Beyond these formal institutional processes, there is perhaps a larger point to be made about how Australian policymakers should be thinking about their Southeast Asian neighbours. In the present evolving and uncertain regional geostrategic environment, Australia might well be wise to be a little less overwhelmingly preoccupied with the United States and China, and to become rather more focused on consolidating our position closer to home. This means developing stronger, closer and more multidimensional relationships with ASEAN and its key member countries.

The argument is essentially that Australia would be more comfortably placed to navigate a course between its superpower military ally and its emerging-superpower major economic partner if it had a stronger identity as a strategic and economic partner with South East Asian neighbours. Australia could, once and for all, shrug off the lingering perception around Asia that it is playing ‘deputy sheriff’ to the United States. This is the kind of role that Australia was building with ASEAN — and especially Indonesia — during the Hawke-Keating governments. But it diminished during the Howard years and Australia has not recovered that ground since.

Any significant move to consolidate and strengthen institutional and personal ties with Southeast Asia — and to make this a clearer and stronger element in the overall foreign policy narrative — need not and should not come at the expense of Australia’s established relationships with the United States and China, and with Japan and South Korea, or even of neglecting the need to rapidly further develop our relationship with India.

It is a matter simply of recognising that nothing is static in the world; that all of us need as many close friendships as we can; and that for Australia there is much to be gained, and nothing to be lost, by making much more of the friendships it already has with its immediate northern neighbours.

There are many areas in which Australia could directly benefit from closer cooperation. These include not only the familiar area of education but also counter-terrorism, civil nuclear energy, agri-food, Islamic banking and forced migration.

Out of all the areas of current and future concern that would benefit from a generally more engaged relationship, forced migration is most in need of rapid advancement. No Australian political party — in or out of government, or sitting on the cross-benches — has conducted itself with any glory in the handling of the asylum seeker issue in recent years.

One of the least glorious chapters of all has been the utter inability of our policymakers to bring to fruition the arrangements contemplated by the Bali Process, which looked for a time so promising, and put in place once and for all an effective regional processing system. But Australia is not going to get there without a rather fundamental recalibration of its attitudes and behaviour towards ASEAN neighbours.

ASEAN matters a lot and it should get more systematically focused attention from both Australia’s business community and foreign policymakers.

Gareth Evans is Chancellor of the Australian National University, Co-Chair of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect and served as Australia’s Foreign Minister from 1988–1996. This article was adapted from a speech for the launch of Sally Percival Wood and Baogang He (eds) The Australia–ASEAN dialogue: Tracing forty years of partnership (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

Read the original post:
Australia needs to refocus on ASEAN

Asean

ASEAN weathering the COVID-19 typhoon

Published

on

Vietnam's Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc addresses a special video conference with leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), on the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Hanoi 14 April, 2020 (Photo:Reuters/Manan Vatsyayana).

Author: Sandra Seno-Alday, Sydney University

The roughly 20 typhoons that hit Southeast Asia each year pale in comparison to the impact on the region of COVID-19 — a storm of a very different sort striking not just Southeast Asia but the world.

 

Just how badly is the COVID-19 typhoon thrashing the region? And what might the post-crisis recovery and reconstruction look like? To answer these questions, it is necessary to investigate the strengths and vulnerabilities of Southeast Asia’s pre-COVID-19 economic infrastructure.

Understanding the structure of the region’s economic house requires going back to 1967, when Southeast Asian countries decided to pledge friendship to one another under the ASEAN framework. While other integrated regions such as NAFTA and the European Union have aggressively broken down trade barriers and significantly boosted intra-regional trade, ASEAN regional economic integration has chugged along slower.

Southeast Asian countries have not viewed trade between each other as a top priority. The trade agreements in the region have been forged around suggestions for ASEAN countries to lower tariffs on intra-regional trade to within a certain range and across limited industries. This has lowered but not eliminated barriers to intra-regional trade. Consequently, a relatively significant share of Southeast Asian trade is with countries outside the region. This active extra-regional engagement has resulted in ASEAN countries’ successful integration into global value chain networks.

A historically outward-facing region, in 2010 around 75 per cent of Southeast Asian commodity imports and exports came from countries outside of ASEAN. This share of extra-regional trade nudged closer to 80 per cent in 2018. This indicates that ASEAN’s global value chain network embeddedness has deepened over time.

Around 40 per cent of ASEAN’s extra-regional trade is with the rest of Asia. From 2010 to 2018 Southeast Asian countries forged major trade relationships with four Asian countries: China, Japan, South Korea and India. Outside Asia, the United States is the region’s major trading partner. ASEAN’s trade focus on Asia’s largest markets is not surprising. Countries tend to establish trade relationships with large, geographically close, and culturally similar markets.

Fostering deep relationships with a few large markets, however, is a double-edged sword. While it has allowed ASEAN to benefit from integration in global value chains, it has also resulted in increased vulnerability to the shocks affecting its network connections.

ASEAN’s participation in global value chains has allowed it to transition from a net regional importer in 1990 to a net regional exporter in 2018. But the region’s deep embeddedness in a small and tightly-coupled network cluster of extra-regional global value chain partners has exposed it to disruption to any and all of its external partners. By contrast, ASEAN’s intra-regional trade network structure is much more loosely-coupled: a consequence of persistent intra-regional trade barriers and thus lower intra-regional trade intensity.

In the pre-COVID-19 period, ASEAN built for itself an economic house held up by just five extra-regional markets, while doing less to expand and diversify its intra-regional trade network. The data shows that ASEAN trade became increasingly concentrated in these few external markets between 2010 and 2018.

This dependence on a handful of markets does not bode well for risk and crisis management. All of the region’s major trading partners have been significantly affected by COVID-19 and this in turn is blowing the ASEAN economic house down.

What are the ways forward? The immediate task at hand is to get a better picture of the region’s position in global value chain networks and to get on top of managing its network risk exposure. Already there are red flags around the region’s food security arising from its position in food value chains. It is critical to look for ways to introduce flexibility into existing supply chains for greater agility in responding to crises.

It is also an opportune time for ASEAN to harness the technology transfer gains of global value chain participation and invest in innovation-driven diversification of products and markets. The region’s embeddedness in global value chain networks certainly places it in a strong position to readily access large export markets not just in Asia but also Europe and the Americas.

Over the longer term, ASEAN is faced with the question of whether it should seriously look…

Source link

Continue Reading

Markets

Tiger Trade Launches SGX Trading, Meeting Demand from Asian Investors

Access to the Singapore Exchange (SGX) adds to Tiger Brokers’ current menu of stock exchanges, such as the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Nasdaq Stock Market (NASDAQ), the world’s two largest stock exchanges, as well as the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX).

Published

on

SINGAPORE (ACN Newswire) – Tiger Trade, a one-stop mobile and online trading application by Tiger Brokers, has launched access to the Singapore Exchange (SGX).

(more…)
Continue Reading

Asean

Can Asia maintain growth with an ever ageing population ?

To boost productivity in the future, Asian governments will have to implement well-targeted structural reforms today.

Published

on

Asia has been the world champion of economic growth for decades, and this year will be no exception. According to the latest International Monetary Fund Regional Economic Outlook(REO), the Asia-Pacific region’s GDP is projected to increase by 5.5% in 2017 and 5.4% in 2018. (more…)

Continue Reading