Regional security has been a primary concern of ASEAN since its inception in 1967. ASEAN member countries recognised from the early days that regional security was closely intertwined with economic and social development—peace and security are essential for economic prosperity and social-cultural development, while prosperity and development create common interests among countries and increase mutual dependence, which in turn enhances regional security.
During the first ASEAN Summit in 1976, member countries signed the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in South-East Asia (TAC), which committed member countries to peaceful settlement of disputes and non-interference in the internal affairs of member countries. Under the treaty, a ‘High Council’ consisting of ministerial-level representatives was also set up to take account of disputes or situations likely to disturb peace and harmony, and recommend appropriate means of settlement to the parties in dispute.
The ASEAN Summit in Bali in 2003 further set forth five areas of political and security cooperation under the so-called Bali Concord II. These five areas are: (1) setting of new norms; (2) maintaining maritime security; (3) keeping the region free of weapons of mass destruction; (4) countering terrorism and transnational crime; and (5) enhancing defence cooperation. The central question is how effective have these efforts been in maintaining and enhancing the security of the region.
With the signing of the ASEAN Charter in 2007, the principles and policies underlying ASEAN’s approach to issues of regional security were set forth. These principles and policies include the peaceful settlement of disputes, the renunciation of the use or threat of force in resolving differences, respect for the sovereignty of nations, non-interference in countries’ internal affairs, and enhanced consultations on matters seriously affecting the common interest of ASEAN.
39 An exception is when there is a common revenue-sharing arrangement. However, unlike the European Union, ASEAN does not have a common budget which is large enough to have an impact on the redistribution of income across the region.
V.B. ASEAN Baseline Report (ABR 2003)
The ASEAN Baseline Report (ABR)40 presents the findings of a preliminary study designed for providing an objective description of the baseline situations in various Vientiane Action Programme (VAP) areas using data available at that time.41 The report was prepared by a team of consultants commissioned by the ASEAN Secretariat in 2006 and published by the same organisation in 2006. The report was also intended to serve as the basis for developing a monitoring system of progress toward the ASEAN Community, and which was called the ASEAN Community Progress Monitoring System (ACPMS).
The ABR report covers four dimensions of the ASEAN Community which were referred to at that time as:
ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) pillar;
1.
ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community (ASCC) pillar;
2.
ASEAN Security Community (ASC) pillar; and 3.
Narrowing the Development Gap (NDG).
4.
The preparation for the report was undertaken by the ABR Team Members of consultants consisting of Dr. Mario B. Lamberte, Dr. Heidi R. Arboleda and Dr. Celia M. Reyes, engaged under the ASEAN-UNDP Partnership Facility (AUPF). In the development of the report, a series of consultations with various stakeholders were undertaken. Specifically, the ABR Team Members consulted intensively with the ASEAN Secretariat desk officers, representatives of ASEAN bodies, other data users and, most importantly, with the data providers. The National Statistical Offices of the ASEAN Member States in particular contributed significantly to the report development through their provision of published and unpublished data and their contributions in a series of workshops held during the construction of the report framework, concept and methodology of the indicators and the required data.
The ABR report considers a wide range of indicators across each of the above four dimensions of ASEAN Community and presents the baseline situation as of 2003 whenever the required data are available.42 Included among the AEC indicators are intra-ASEAN trade in goods, intra-ASEAN tariffs and non-tariff barriers, various customs performance indicators, commercial services trade, intra-ASEAN investment, intra-ASEAN tourism, and employment. For the ASCC pillar, the report includes indicators such as poverty and income distribution, life expectancy, child and maternal mortality, health expenditure, infectious diseases, literacy and school enrolment, social security and welfare, labour participation and unemployment, environmental sustainability, and population access to safe drinking water. For the ASC pillar, the reports presented baseline scores based on indicators reflecting political development (such as whether nor not at least track-two events were held per year), shaping and sharing of norms (such as whether or not the ASEAN Charter was adopted), conflict prevention (such as the absence of armed confrontation among ASEAN Member States), conflict resolution (such as the activation of the TAC High Council), and post-conflict peace building (such as the adoption or not of a common, standard operating procedure for establishing safe havens in the region). Finally, for the NDG dimension, the reports present measures of disparities in levels of economic and human development based on the average of the best three performers, coefficient of variation, and ratio of CLMV–ASEAN6 averages. These measures are computed for various areas including per capita income, poverty incidence, income distribution, life expectancy, adult literacy, infant mortality and access to safe drinking water. The report also provides some comparisons with the disparities among EU-25 Member States and discussions at the sub-regional growth area level.
V.C. ASEAN Community Progress Monitoring System (ACPMS 2007)
The ACPMS report is a continuation of efforts to measure the progress of ASEAN member countries towards the main goals of the ASEAN Community. It refines and updates the earlier report, the ASEAN Baseline Report (ABR) which provided the 2003 baseline situation for the three pillars of the ASEAN Community.
Work for this report was undertaken by a team of consultants from the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research at the University of Melbourne (Associate Professor Elizabeth Webster, Dr Jongsay Yong, Dr Alfons Palangkaraya, Professor Peter Lloyd); Dr Celia Reyes from the Philippines;
and a team from the ASEAN Secretariat (Dr Agus Sutanto, Mr John de Guia, Ms Lia Emalia, Mr Fathur Rachman, Mr Raditya Kusumaningprang).
While the format and content of the report are based on the ABR, revisions and modifications were made after consultations with stakeholders in each country43 and a regional meeting in Bangkok. A nominated focal person from the national statistical office in each country acted as a conduit for information between the research team and the local interest groups. Following the regional meeting in Bangkok, a series of national workshops were held in eight of the ten member countries to discuss the purpose of the report, data requirements and other issues. Subsequent revisions and updates were made at a regional meeting in Jakarta, and at the Eighth ASEAN Heads of Statistical Offices Meeting in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in December 2007. Work for this report began in June 2007 and concluded in March 2008.
An effective monitoring device should contain indicators which are concise, reliable and well-targeted.
The desirable data for constructing such indicators need to be cost-effective to collect, accurate, timely and consistent across jurisdictions. These are the two basic principles underlying the development of the ACPMS framework for providing a workable monitoring system that can produce a report suitable for presentation at high-level ASEAN meetings. In this section, we provide a brief overview of the indicators in the current ACPMS framework (ACPMS 2007), before we discuss in detail our proposal for an additional set of AEC and ASCC indicators for consideration to enhance the framework.
Altogether, there are 46 indicators in the ACPMS 2007 framework: 21 indicators for AEC and 25 indicators for ASCC. The full list of the 21 AEC indicators is provided in Appendix 1. As can be seen from the table, the distribution of the indicators within the 2007 ACPMS framework is not even, reflecting data availability as well as the focus within each pillar detailed in the AEC Blueprint. Specifically, there are 15 indicators to measure progress toward the AEC Pillar I (single market and production base), two indicators to measure progress toward the AEC Pillar II (competitive economic region), one indicator to measure progress toward the AEC Pillar III (equitable economic development), and three indicators to measure progress toward the AEC Pillar IV (integration into the global economy).
From the above breakdown of AEC indicators there are some gaps that need to be filled. In financial integration, for example, there is only one indicator of convergence, which is based on annual real interest rates. Additional indicators similarly constructed, based on the returns of different specific assets such as government bond yields of different maturities and stock market returns constructed using higher frequency data, could be very useful. Further indicators for the second (competitive economic region) and third pillars (equitable economic development) could be added if the required data are available.
43 During the project stakeholder consultations were undertaken via personal visits to each member country by at least one of the consultants. See Volume 3 for details of these consultations.
The ASCC Blueprint (ASEAN, 2009) envisions six characteristics for the ASCC: human development (ASCC Pillar I); social welfare and protection (ASCC Pillar II); social justice and rights (ASCC Pillar III);
ensuring environmental sustainability (ASCC Pillar IV); building the ASEAN Identity (ASCC Pillar V);
and narrowing the development gap (ASCC Pillar VI). However, because of the cross-sectoral nature of these six areas there is a higher degree of overlapping in terms of the outcomes that each indicator measures.
The breakdown of the 2007 ASCC indicators is as follows: four indicators to measure progress in the areas related to poverty and income distribution; five indicators to measure progress in the area of health;
five indicators to measure progress in the area of education; three indicators to measure progress in the area of labour market; seven indicators to measure progress in the area of environment; and one indicator to measure progress in the area of ASEAN Identity.
As in the AEC case, the ACPMS 2007’s indicators do not cover the ASCC pillars uniformly. This is partly due to differences in the breadth of the pillars and partly to data availability. However, unlike the AEC case, instead of adding indicators that require new data that may not be available, the ASCC indicators can be improved significantly by adding measures of social-cultural convergence based on the already-included indicators. For example, for the indicator ‘the proportion of population living below $1 a day’, an ASEAN figure that reflects the population distribution of ASEAN as one region is provided. This indicator can be extended by simply providing the ratio of the proportions of ASEAN6 to CLMV countries to get a better measure of narrowing development gap. Similarly, for indicators for which even the ASEAN figure has not been provided, such as the Gini coefficient or infant mortality rate, the ASCC framework can be enhanced simply by adding the ASEAN, the ASEAN6 and CLMV figures that take into account differences in population size.
V.D. Enhanced ACPMS Framework (ACPMS 2012)
The objective of the enhanced ASEAN Community Progress Monitoring System (ACPMS) is to improve the usefulness of the framework for monitoring ASEAN’s progress towards the ASEAN Community goals envisioned in the Declaration of ASEAN Concord II (Bali Concord II) and signed by the ASEAN Member States in 2003. It is expected that with the additional indicators and recent data update, the enhanced ACPMS 2012 framework will better reflect progress towards the desired characteristics of ASEAN Economic Community and ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community.
Without continuous feedback on how well ASEAN Member States (AMS) are advancing towards the ASEAN Community targets envisioned in the AEC and ASCC Blueprints (ASEAN, 2007 and 2009), the effectiveness of the agreements ratified will be unclear. Similarly, without up-to-date information on the progress of past agreements and initiatives and their impacts, the value of further initiatives could be undermined as the direction needed to be taken will be less clear. Since the ASEAN Community agreements are designed to enhance the socio-economic well-being of the people of ASEAN, the lack of a clear understanding of progress towards achieving the goals of the agreements will be to the people’s detriment.
The enhanced ACPMS framework of indicators is intended to complement other efforts to monitor the progress of ASEAN member countries towards an ASEAN Community. In its current form, the ACPMS framework developed in 2007 (ASEAN 2008a; 2008b) already provides both refinements and data updates to the ASEAN Baseline Report (ABR). One of the most important improvements brought about by the ACPMS 2007 report is the refocusing of the framework of indicators to capture the general outcomes of
the ASEAN Economic Community Scorecard (ASEAN, 2012) and the AEC Blueprint Midterm Review (which is intended to provide more detail information on the immediate impacts of the integration policies that have been implemented).
However, in order to ensure the continued effectiveness as a progress monitoring system, the ACPMS indicators will need regular updating as new data become available, and will need periodic review as new agreements and initiatives are introduced to ensure on-going relevance.