Potential Impacts of ASEAN Community 2015 To The ASEAN Youth

Asean Economic Community 2015

ASEAN Leaders have pledged a commitment to build ASEAN Economic Community 2015 that is aimed to fasten the development of Southeast Asian countries. It’s an important huge step for ASEAN countries that, mostly, are still developing. However, there is one point that needs to be underlined for an archipelago nation like Indonesia, an equitable development. There is no use of penetrating into global market system if there only some parts of this archipelago are developed while other parts remained under-developed.

On the ASEAN Economic Community blue print, it’s stated four main goals; to build one market and production basis in ASEAN, to improve the economic competitiveness among ASEAN countries, to reduce the economic gap among members, and to fasten ASEAN economic integration to the global economic. To achieve those main goals stated above, ASEAN countries will facilitate the free flow of goods, services, investment, capital and labor in ASEAN area.

In the other hand, ASEAN countries have significant amounts of youth population. Youth is the history narration of world’s glories. What is a nation without youth, without the youth contributing, without conscious youth who love their country? There would be no history of Indonesia, there would be no French Revolution, and there would be no struggle to uphold the truth.

Through the existence of ASEAN Economic Community 2015, there will be impacts that are potentially happened during the process of achieving the main goals related to younger generation. First, the competition of youth and students to get involved into the process of achieving the main goals of ASEAN Economic Community 2015 in national and international levels will be increasing. It is also related to the fact that ASEAN countries’ ranks (except Singapore) on Global Competitiveness Index are not high enough in the past five years. Second, since ASEAN countries will later facilitate the free flow of labors, there will potentially be a lot of ASEAN young people working in another country within the Southeast Asia area, which also means the competitiveness to find a good job is no more in national level. Therefore, the participation of youth in the productive workforce and the fresh-values indeed needs to be improved as a way of preparing ourselves for the global market.

In the education sector, more and more universities in Southeast Asia have been inching up to the best 100 universities in the world, such as National University of Singapore, which, along with University of Gadjah Mada and Chulalongkorn University, has the best education quality assurance system among ASEAN universities. Hopefully these universities can be the examples and will lead other universities to improve their quality, and hence more ASEAN students could compete in the world level. During The 12th ASEAN Summit in Cebu, the Leaders also agreed to prepare ASEAN youth for regional leadership and to increase the competitiveness of the peoples of Southeast Asia through education. All these things are made to get ASEAN youth well prepared and get used to “global market atmosphere”.

In the future, ASEAN youth will take the responsibility of the development of their own nation without pulling out their own identity through their own culture since, stick to the fact, ASEAN countries have abundant cultures and resources that have to be kept for the sake of the next generation. If all the points mentioned are executed by ASEAN youth, leading the world in couple more years is no more impossible for ASEAN countries.