We’re worried that our ASEAN’s youth still lack awareness skills and knowldege to compete facing ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) this year. We will facing it by the end of this year. We just need more spirit, more education and training. As we know, from 600 million, there are fully 60 percent of ASEAN’s population are youth.

      

      The four ASEAN countries which have gross domestic product per capita values higher than the ASEAN average of US$3,770 are Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia, and Thailand. Despite countries such a the Philippines and Vietnam recording lower-than-average GDP per capita values of US$2,765 and US$1,911 respectively, these countries have shown consistent positive growth over the years (establishmentpost.com). It is critical to know what AEC is and understand how it will affect Indonesia as well as the other nine countries. One advantage of an integrated economic community is that movement of goods, services, investments and professionals will be much easier. However, this doesn’t mean that ASEAN countries will be treated as one. Each country is free to have its own regulation related to their local domestic movement.

Honestly we have potentially youths and now working abroad. But are we sure that they will really bringing skills back to the country?

      AEC comes into being this year. So the map of ASEAN becomes not just a collection of countries but an entity and companies, and also Including industry from small sector have already started coming up the strategies to target the consumers in our region (red:ASEAN) as a whole.

     

     The positive impacts for this AEC initiative are liberation of services and improved tradefacilitation to the member countries. Yet, this benefit can only be enjoyed if the countries are prepared to face the competition.

In general, people have more interest in well-developed and economically-strong countries such as China, Japan, South Korea, the European Union or United States. However, when we talk about the AEC, we should know more about the values that the ten emerging ASEAN countries have. The South East Asian youths should spend more effort in learning and understanding the culture and history of the neighboring countries as this can enable the ASEAN population to better interact and collaborate in the future.

      Public awareness regarding this issues has to be taken more seriously. If we don’t have a firm stance to face the soon-to-be-opened chance, we can be brought away by the stream and drown. The urgency of this matter should not be limited by the local media’s lack of interest to make it their headline, please just don’t made only the political drama of election or something else that seem more appealing to the news reader. As ASEAN youth, especially my beloved Indonesian youth, we should have more effort to socialize this issue. We can make use of our social medias to deliberately spread the urgency as most of us use have already been using them liberally.

    

     By 2015, ten countries in Southeast Asia plan to launch a single market for goods, services, capital and labor, which has the potential to be one of the largest economies and markets in the world. Here are 12 things to know about the ASEAN Economic Community (www.adb.org).

I met with amazing people during SSEAYP, and i hope we could always work together facing AEC as one family.