INTRODUCTION

Summary

On 18 June 2009, the ASEAN Studies Centre of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung organized the ASEAN Roundtable 2009 with the theme “The Global Economic Crisis: Implications for ASEAN”. The brainstorming session gathered experts from the region to discuss the impact of the current economic crisis on ASEAN member countries and its community-building process. It did this through the lens of regional security, the social impact and the economy and finance. The roundtable had Mr Arin Jira, Chairman of the ASEAN Business Advisory Council, as the distinguished luncheon speaker.

The roundtable concluded that the crisis had a significant impact on the region, and ASEAN needed to have a better coordinated approach if it was to weather the storm. The region had taken into account the fact that the developed countries like the United States and the European Union would take a longer time to come out of the crisis. Hence, while export-led growth policies had served the region well in the past, governments now had to adopt policies that were oriented more to the domestic or regional markets. Another conclusion of the roundtable had to do with the notion of “security”. The current economic crisis was considered as a new kind of insecurity. Hence, the future treatment of regional security should be reconceptualized, so that there could be better prospects of anticipating future threats from the economic realm. Lastly, the roundtable judged that ASEAN had not fully addressed the implications of the current crisis for the poor. In the light of the tendency of the crisis to push an increasing number of people to become poor, ASEAN cooperation in labour and social protection needed to aim at preventing the crisis from causing further social damage.

The roundtable's programme and a list of the names and contact data of the participants are at the end of this report.

The report begins with a brief background and summarizes the important observations made during the discussions. It includes the recommendations made. This is followed by short papers by Herman Joseph S. Kraft, Yeo Lay Hwee, Kazutoshi Chatani and Kee Beom Kim, Lim Teck Ghee, Hui Cheung Tai, and Raymond Atje and Pratiwi Kartika.

We hope that the summary and the papers will help both policy-makers and the interested public in understanding the impact of the current economic crisis on ASEAN and Southeast Asia as a region.