Lub koom haum ASEAN yav dhau los thiab nws lub neej pem suab

Professor Luke Nottage, University of Sydney Source: Courtesy of Professor Luke Nottage

SBS Hmong

View Podcast Series

Follow and Subscribe

Download the SBS Audio appAvailable on iOS and Android

Koom haum ASEAN tau ua dab tsi yav dhau los thiab lub neej pem suab yuav zoo li cas ntxiv.

Listen to Professor Luke Nottage, University of Sydney insights into ASEAN past and future in English here:

Koom haum ASEAN lub neej pem suab

The main purpose of setting up ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nation) in the 1960s is initially for security reasons as communism spreading at the time but then shifted to economic development and economic integration. As it added more members in the 1990s like Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar and China has entered World Trade Organisation in 2000, ASEAN needed new visions.

Luke Nottage xplained that “ ASEAN realised that they need to try some new things in terms of new free trades and investments especially initiate within the region within South East Asia, to be able to have some sort of a competitive regional production base to export trade with the rest of the world rather than competition with China.”

Professor Luke Nottage, major in economic, trade, investment and consumer law of harmonisation, University of Sydney elaborated that ASEAN’s Free Trade Agreement (FTA) has been established in 1992 and then expanded in 2007 which it came up with the ASEAN Economic Initiative to bring down complete tariff within ASEAN but they faced to many obstacles and hardly achieved in 2015 but get quite close to their missions. And they have managed to have Free Trade Agreement (FTA) deals with the Asia Pacific region i.e., India, China, South Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand to expand their market access in the region. But what mechanism that ASEAN need to make it ready for its economic integration not just within itself with globally?

Luke Nottage reiriterated that “ FTA has have built into them some potentially quite effective dispute resolution mechanism to ensure they are enforced where they have to be so for example for all those FTA investment chapters that ASEAN is into include the possibility of foreign investors making a claim directly against the host state for discriminatory treatment or not giving fair treatment or denying local court um so that is pretty effective credible mechanism to be able to enforce those sort of protection so far investors and the aim of encouraging more cross border FTA. So on the whole there has been increasing attention to economic integration within ASEAN and with the rest of the world.”

But how can ASEAN harness its economic advantages?

Luke Nottage replied “We find that there is great recognition in all the ASEAN member states even the less develop ones that you know there is great opportunity to specialized in products and services that each countries has comparative advantages in them and trade them and there is more opportunity for example China One Belt One Road initiative to try boosting infrastructure connecting up China South to East Asia through Central Asia and so on to expand trade flows. The next question is how you deal with adjustment issues that comes in countries try to specialise in goods and services they have comparative advantages. And there is growing recognition around the world citizen US particular recently and so on that, that has to be managed and that has to be more active government system to help companies and employees and so on move out from industries that are no longer competitive to the ones that will be competitive.”

But it is facing with many challenges due to the lacking of consumer protection laws and implementing them effectively.

Luke Nottage pointed to “The challenges in some of the ASEAN countries is that, government systems both political and beaurocrats often not transparent have corruption and so on, so that process of assessments can be captured by best of interests and so on so it has to be done carefully particularly challenges in developing countries including South East Asia compare to developed countries. I think ASEAN is very aware that they don’t want the situation where we open up the border to trade even further with ASEAN to the rest of the world, and then every dump their unsafe products especially on the less developed countries which are desperate for the cheaper goods and even serious risk of public health and don’t have adequate regulatory safeguard to prevent unsafe goods coming to the markets or deal with them when they appeared on the markets. If you don’t have an effective mechanism like a class action regime that aggregate those claims, manufacturers and importers won’t take so seriously the need to dealing safe products. And so the last three or four years, they are trying to harmonise minimum standards of consumer protection laws across all the member states so that help consumers benefits from increase trade while also maintaining some minimum protection. I think when you look around the region, we have seen improvements in environment protection standards and also cooperation between member states on some issues. ”

Therefore having a base line safeguard regulatory and civil society as well as active media are good for the enforcement of these mechanism. So how important is ASEAN to Australia and New Zealand Trade ties?

Luke Nottage gave some insights that “I think its crucial I mean for example in investment Australian investors tend to be conservative till recent decades. They have tended to invest in other developed countries like the USA. When they invest in Asia, a lot of that tend to go to Singapore, because they speak English, it’s more developed country and it is familiar. Although from Singapore, it is hard to track but other investment flows on to neighbouring member states. Australian companies are starting to realise that a lot of activities and energy and other developed members in ASEAN and lots more happening and it is tightly integrated and so they starting to appreciate that there is more potential. So that Australian investors Kings Gate in Thailand a few years ago was actually looking into make other investments in other ASEAN countries using the technologies and experience they have in Thailand when they start their mining operation in Thailand but they are looking to involve in other countries. That’s on top of all the trade that we already have with ASEAN which is in some way it is easier to develop and encouraging people to commit long term investment.”##