T

he ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) is not the end of community '€” building in our part of the world. It has helped push socio-economic development in ASEAN. While many of us are still struggling on the lower end of the development ladder, many have already climbed to the ladder'€™s middle and upper rungs, allowing us to share development experiences with one another more fruitfully through integration and cooperation.

We, the people of ASEAN, are catching up with neighbors far and near who have graduated earlier and set the frontier of development through technological leadership. Gaining a decent position in the increasingly knowledge '€” intensive civilization is within our reach. Through community '€” building we create an immense geographical and human space. ASEAN accounted for 8.6 percent of the world'€™s population in 2015.

The population is projected to rise to 728 million in 2030. The workforce in ASEAN will continue to grow progressively until 2020 by 20 percent in the Philippines, 11 percent in Indonesia, and 9 percent in Vietnam. Migrant workers add to the complexity of labor and employment issues in ASEAN.

ASEAN originates roughly 14 million migrant workers of whom 6 million live and work within member states. At present, female household workers form the majority of this migrant workforce. In the longer term, familiarity with the world of migrant workers is going to give ASEAN an edge of advantage compared to economies with tightly protected labor markets. In other words, ASEAN is a formidable space in terms of the potential that comes along with a large population.

It can never be overemphasized that the value of a workforce to a society depends greatly on its capacity as human capital. Only a healthy, literate, skilled and entrepreneurial workforce can deliver the progress that ASEAN aspires to amplify through three-tier community '€” building; economic, socio-cultural and political-security communities.

On this score, ASEAN has a lot to catch up to do despite the very encouraging increases in government spending on education and training. While enrollment in secondary education has risen strongly, more is needed in vocational education and training (VET). Even existing VET facilities are in urgent need of improvement in order to be able to supply graduates who can compete globally, seamlessly connected to the world market following digitization. Likewise, enrollment in tertiary education has also risen strongly in ASEAN. In 2012, tertiary education figures stood at 16 percent in Cambodia, 25 percent in Vietnam, 31 percent in Indonesia, 34 percent in the Philippines, 37 percent in Malaysia and 57 percent in Thailand.

However, annual spending per student varies widely from US$539 in the Philippines and $2,188 in Indonesia to over $19,000 in Singapore. What is more, the composition of tertiary education in ASEAN is biased against science and engineering, the fields of studies that serve as the springboard for the technological innovations which we enjoy today. In the case of Indonesia and the Philippines, the two most populous members of ASEAN, science and engineering accounts for less than 22 percent and 26 percent respectively in the total number of graduates. The number of outbound students from ASEAN in recent times is less than a quarter of a million or only 32 percent of outbound students from China.

Together with health, literacy and skill constitute a great part of human capital. However, in a modern economy they can only produce marvelous products, services and processes in combination with entrepreneurship. Freedom of skilled workers within the AEC requires freedom of capital and its bearers, the entrepreneurs, serve as a complement to this. As one can gauge from the flow of intra-ASEAN foreign investment, our region is still more dependent on extra-ASEAN investments, suggesting that our work on community building, with regard to enterprise flow, is far below potential.

Our governments have acted too cautiously in integrating our labor markets, fearing that cross-border labor flow is a zero-sum game in that one foreign worker replaces one local worker when in reality it perhaps creates more than one. We are too hesitant in forwarding ASEAN integration. We are running the risk of being pushed to the back corner of Asia-Pacific regional integration and cooperation. We need bold initiatives on ASEAN integration to ensure ASEAN creates rewarding value for each of us, as an arena to acquire competencies needed to prevail globally.

Labor and employment are areas where bold initiatives are needed. We have opened our borders for the intra-ASEAN flow of skilled-workers, yet I am wondering whether we have done enough to make our workers mobile or '€œtradable'€ through world-class education, including world-class VETs modeled, perhaps, on the German-Swiss '€œdual VETs'€ where schooling and working get merged.

Collaboration among our secondary and tertiary education institutions needs elevation, however important extra-ASEAN collaboration may be. Furthermore, ASEAN government, academic and corporate research centers of excellence need catalysts of which ASEAN community deepening is indispensable.

We have accomplished a great deal in making ASEAN part of the solution to the complex problems we have faced in the five decades since 1967. We need to increasingly act together, pooling our human resources more creatively, to ensure that ASEAN is in a decent place when integration in the Asia-Pacific reaches an escape velocity that transforms the vast region into an integrated whole.
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The above is based on a presentation for a recent symposium on workforce readiness in the ASEAN Economic Community in Singapore. The writers are from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.