Lecture: ASEAN Economic Community Blueprint 2025 and Mega-FTAs: Implication for Development Strategies in the New Era

ASEAN has been a pioneer for implementing an innovative development strategy in which the mechanics of production networks or the second unbundling has aggressively been exploited.  Beginning with slow global value chains, countries start linking with fast and well-coordinated international production networks and then initiate forming industrial agglomeration in which local firms take part in the vertical division of labor with multinationals and take advantage of technology transfer and spillover to activate process innovation.  For some advanced countries, the creation of innovation hubs for active product innovation became an immediate challenge.

In this context, four pillars of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) Blueprint 2015 together with the effort of enhancing connectivity have greatly contributed to the development of links with production networks by latecomers and the narrowing of geographical development gaps.  ASEAN should now focus more on policy efforts for forming industrial agglomerations and innovation hubs in order to not only narrow industrial development gaps but, nurture and attract intellectual human resources.  From this viewpoint, AEC Blueprint 2025 will be reviewed and evaluated.

In addition, potential impacts of mega-FTAs including Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (TPP) and Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) on ASEAN will also be discussed.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Fukunari Kimura has been Professor, Faculty of Economics, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan since 2000 and also the Dean, Graduate School of Economics, Keio University since 2015.  He is also Chief Economist, Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA), Jakarta, Indonesia since 2008.  He serves as a co-editor of the Journal of the Japanese and International Economies.  He was born in Tokyo in 1958 and received his Bachelor of Laws from the Faculty of Law, University of Tokyo in 1982, Master of Science and Ph.D. from the Department of Economics, University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1990 and 1991.  He worked for the International Development Center of Japan as Researcher in 1982-1986, the Department of Economics, State University of New York at Albany as Assistant Professor in 1991-1994, and the Faculty of Economics, Keio University as Associate Professor in 1994-2000.  His major is international trade and development economics.  In particular, he has recently been active in writing academic/semi-academic books and articles on international production networks and economic integration in East Asia.

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