ASEAN Meeting

1. The goal of the ASEAN meeting is to improve and harmonise trade and investment policies as the bloc pursues an integrated regional economy by 2015.
2. The ERIA is the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia and they intend to draw up plans to aid in the bloc's plans to integrate policies.
3. The AEC is the ASEAN Economic Community and they plan to merge economic policies.
4. The three major areas are trade, transport services and investment facilitation.
5. The group plans to meet once every year.
6. They plan to establish a knowledge bank on possible tools members can use to pursue effective reforms and also a data bank of all regulatory reforms ASEAN members have made.
7. The Chairman of the meeting was Dato Lim Jock Hoi who is the Brunei Minister for Foreign Affairs. Brunei has a population of 400,000 and the GDP is $49711 per capita. Australia has a higher population compared to Brunei but GDP is $36642 per capita in Australia. This means that Brunei population is much richer per capita than Australia.
8. Economic integration refers to trade unification between different states by the partial or full abolishing of custom tariffs on trade taking place within the borders of each state.
9. I think this will not be beneficial for Australia as Brunei is not a developing country and they do not need the coal we would make money from as they have high levels of oil. As Australia is in such close proximity to the Southern Asian area that is where we would make a lot of money from so abolishing any tariffs or trade would definitely not be beneficial for the Australian economy.