The rest of this study is organized as follows. First, we offer a brief review of the commercial
policies of the AMCs in Section 2. Next, we present and analyze key issues in aligning ASEAN
commercial policies in order to build the ACU in Section 3, a process which promises to be
complicated. Section 4 surveys quantitative estimates of the impact of regional economic
integration in ASEAN through AFTA, followed in Section 5 by a comparison of the economic
and political-economy effects of an ACU compared to AFTA. Finally, Section 6 gives some
concluding remarks and recommendations.