How reading tomorrow’s signals today can guide ASEAN’s shared
choices for resilience, sustainability and long-term competitiveness.
By Dr. Tan Shu Ying (shuying@might.org.my)
ASEAN is no longer a side story. The eleven members of ASEAN now represent about 690 million people and a combined economy of more than 4.1 trillion US dollars, placing the bloc among the five largest economies in the world if treated as a single market.
Behind the numbers lies something even more powerful. ASEAN is still young. Around 61 per cent of its people are under 35. This generation will walk the road to sustainable competitiveness that the region is building today. The same demographic energy, together with relatively competitive costs of doing business, is attracting investors and fueling a fast-growing digital economy on track to reach 300 billion US dollars in gross merchandise value by 2025.
At the same time, the world around us is becoming harsher. Asia Pacific is already the most disaster-prone region in the world, experiencing more intense floods, storms, droughts, and heatwaves striking with increasing severity. A high-emissions pathway could deeply cut regional GDP by 2070, with some ASEAN economies among the hardest hit. In this swirl of growth, risk, and disruption, the question is simple. How can ASEAN stay competitive and resilient, not just cheap and convenient?
ASEAN’s future competitiveness is not guaranteed. It must be designed, and it will be shaped by how four communities act together: government, industry, academia and researchers, and society. Foresight does not predict one future. It helps us read early signals and decide what to do now, before choices close.
Four Glimpses of the Next ASEAN
Foresight does not claim to predict a single future. Instead, it lays out a few plausible futures and asks: if this were to happen, what would we wish we had done earlier?
So let us envision four plausible snapshots of ASEAN of the future.
These scenarios are just an example of plausible futures for ASEAN. ASEAN itself, too, has already begun to imagine its own futures. The ASEAN Community Vision 2025 and subsequent works such as ASEAN 2030: Toward a Borderless Economic Community and ASEAN Vision 2040 have explored how the region can become more cohesive, competitive and people-centred. More recently, ASEAN Ahead: ASEAN STI Ecosystem Foresight 2035 and Beyond, led by the Academy of Sciences Malaysia, has set out regional STI scenarios and a “Triple 10” ambition that now informs the ASEAN Plan of Action on Science, Technology and Innovation 2026–2035.
None of these futures is inevitable. The path we take will depend on how we read the early signals and how the region’s quadruple helix of governments, industry, academia and researchers, and society, responds.
