ASEAN Economic Community (AEC): An Empirical Impact Analysis

Abstract

Regional Economic Integration is considered the most powerful method of ensuring productivity and attaining economic prosperity. ASEAN Economic Community established to achieve one vision, one identity, and one community is one of Asia's most promising regional economic integration. It aims to emerge as a leading integrated economy in the world. To establish this community, ASEAN adopted Blueprint-2015 in 2007; after implementing the community, it enhanced this blueprint and adopted Blueprint-2025 in 2015. The Blueprint-2025 mentioned five characteristics as the target for ASEAN Economic Community to be undertaken for 2016-2025. Besides, the blueprint also mentioned some significant elements associated with the characteristics. This study focused on the empirical analysis of these characteristics of Blueprint-2025. Therefore, this work used the data of the ten ASEAN countries from 2010 to 2019 by selecting some indicators representing the elements of these characteristics. The finding of this analysis suggested that a large number of the indicators have experienced a decent level of progress, whereas only a few failed to achieve the expected trend.