The Association for Southeast Asian Nations or ASEAN has been set up in 1976 in order to
build a strong political and military block that is resisting the communism idea from China
(Department of Trade Negotiations, 2011). There were five countries starting the ASEAN
group that were Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Then, Brunei
Darussalam, Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia had become members of ASEAN later.
Under the vision of “one vision, one identity, and one community”, ASEAN has four main
aims that are: 1) Free trade and service area, including investment, labor, and capital, 2)
Competitive advantage, including e-ASEAN development, and tax and competitive policy
development, 3) Sustainable economic development, including SMEs supports, and 4) the
world economic integration, including FTA (free trade agreement) planning with other
countries, and production network.
ASEAN, at the moment, has contained 600 million people from 10 member countries
together. The main goals of ASEAN are driven into three perspectives, a) ASEAN security
community, b) ASEAN socio-cultural community, and c) ASEAN economic community.
ASEAN in the new name of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) and the member
countries hope to form a “single market and production base” where the production factors
can freely move anywhere anytime across the AEC member countries (Srijunpetch, 2012).