turnaround toward enlarging their market, attracting investments, cutting costs, increasing efficiency, improving productivity, and thus generating jobs and raising people’s incomes.
At the Fourth ASEAN Summit in 1992, member countries agreed to create the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA), a step toward regional economic integration, in which tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade among the members would be reduced and eventually abolished. However, ASEAN regional free trade alone was (and is) seen as inadequate for the regional grouping to be able to tap effectively into unprecedented opportunities as well as cope with