Asean
ASEAN Mediates in Cambodia, Thailand Conflict
Thailand and Cambodia agreed Tuesday to accept Indonesian observers and avoid further clashes over a border dispute. The agreement is a victory for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its current head the Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa who took on a high profile role in mediating the dispute. After hosting a meeting in Jakarta between the Cambodian foreign minister and his Thai counterpart, Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa announced that a unique arrangement had been reached to end the violent clashes between the two countries. Both sides have been fighting over a territory near a historical Hindu Khmer temple on the Thai-Cambodian border. The foreign ministers, he says, have agreed to what he called an unofficial ceasefire, to allow in unarmed Indonesian military and civilian observers to enforce the ceasefire, and to hold further bilateral talks with Indonesian participation in the near future. Natalegawa says he is not concerned that the ceasefire is unofficial as long as both sides adhere to it. “The statement speaks of avoidance of armed conflict and which is what our understanding of a ceasefire is. And so there will be further meeting between the two sides to try to really solidify the present situation. So I am not going to be trapped into legality of is there a ceasefire or not a ceasefire. As long as the guns are silent and the artillery is not making nosies,” Natalegawa said. “I will be quite happy then.” Southeast Asia political analyst Carl Thayer is with the University of New South Wales. He credits Natalegawa, who as chairman of ASEAN took the diplomatic initiative to visit both countries in the past month, and got involved in meetings at the United Nations Security Council in New York. He says the successful mediation efforts gives ASEAN new credibility on issues that affect peace and stability in the region. “I am very optimistic. It is a very big step for ASEAN,” Thayer stated. “The issue was taken before the UN Security Council and it threw the hot potato to ASEAN to follow through on. And Indonesia as chair, its foreign minister has taken a proactive role and has got the agreement of Thailand and Cambodia to show up when Thailand was saying it could only be settled bilaterally.” ASEAN has a strict policy of non-interference in member states’ internal affairs and has been criticized for doing too little to resolve conflicts and preserve regional security. But Natalegawa say when the conflict began in early February, he saw a role for ASEAN to play. “This is a seminal development in ASEAN’s capacity to deal with conflict situation. When the conflict broke out last fourth of February, as head of ASEAN we were sure, certain that sooner or later this issue will come on ASEAN’s lap. So it is best that we start early and have the advantage of time and have the advantage of setting the tone,” Natalegawa said. While the ceasefire is a significant breakthrough, Natalegawa says the mediation process is just beginning and finding a permanent solution to the border dispute will take more time and negotiation.
Thailand and Cambodia agreed Tuesday to accept Indonesian observers and avoid further clashes over a border dispute. The agreement is a victory for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its current head the Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa who took on a high profile role in mediating the dispute.
After hosting a meeting in Jakarta between the Cambodian foreign minister and his Thai counterpart, Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa announced that a unique arrangement had been reached to end the violent clashes between the two countries. Both sides have been fighting over a territory near a historical Hindu Khmer temple on the Thai-Cambodian border.
The foreign ministers, he says, have agreed to what he called an unofficial ceasefire, to allow in unarmed Indonesian military and civilian observers to enforce the ceasefire, and to hold further bilateral talks with Indonesian participation in the near future.
Natalegawa says he is not concerned that the ceasefire is unofficial as long as both sides adhere to it.
“The statement speaks of avoidance of armed conflict and which is what our understanding of a ceasefire is. And so there will be further meeting between the two sides to try to really solidify the present situation. So I am not going to be trapped into legality of is there a ceasefire or not a ceasefire. As long as the guns are silent and the artillery is not making nosies,” Natalegawa said. “I will be quite happy then.”
Southeast Asia political analyst Carl Thayer is with the University of New South Wales. He credits Natalegawa, who as chairman of ASEAN took the diplomatic initiative to visit both countries in the past month, and got involved in meetings at the United Nations Security Council in New York. He says the successful mediation efforts gives ASEAN new credibility on issues that affect peace and stability in the region.
“I am very optimistic. It is a very big step for ASEAN,” Thayer stated. “The issue was taken before the UN Security Council and it threw the hot potato to ASEAN to follow through on. And Indonesia as chair, its foreign minister has taken a proactive role and has got the agreement of Thailand and Cambodia to show up when Thailand was saying it could only be settled bilaterally.”
ASEAN has a strict policy of non-interference in member states’ internal affairs and has been criticized for doing too little to resolve conflicts and preserve regional security. But Natalegawa say when the conflict began in early February, he saw a role for ASEAN to play.
“This is a seminal development in ASEAN’s capacity to deal with conflict situation. When the conflict broke out last fourth of February, as head of ASEAN we were sure, certain that sooner or later this issue will come on ASEAN’s lap. So it is best that we start early and have the advantage of time and have the advantage of setting the tone,” Natalegawa said.
While the ceasefire is a significant breakthrough, Natalegawa says the mediation process is just beginning and finding a permanent solution to the border dispute will take more time and negotiation.
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ASEAN Mediates in Cambodia, Thailand Conflict
Asean
ASEAN weathering the COVID-19 typhoon
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…
Markets
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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).
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…)Asean
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To boost productivity in the future, Asian governments will have to implement well-targeted structural reforms today.
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…)
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