The many free trade agreements and talks in the Asia Pacific will be in the spotlight in the coming year as breakthroughs or at least major progress are expected for some of them.

Scholars have said that the regional integration is also a process of economies integrating into a world of supply chains.

… Kaewkamol Pitakdumrongkit, an assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University, said that the work has been mostly done on tariff reduction and that the targets remaining to be achieved are mainly those in areas such as non-tariff barriers, services trade, investment liberalization and free flow of skilled labor.

… Kaewkamol sees the deepening of the regional production and supply chain as the most significant change in the coming decade. She expects ASEAN to take this into consideration in developing its new blueprint.