ASEAN Tidbits

One visa for all countries in ASEAN—great idea! The fact that you’ve got Thailand,Malaysia and Vietnam all fighting over the same pool of potential business clients and ton of tourists going to both Cambodia and Thailand (and to a lesser degree Vietnam) this is a great deal for Thailand—as the largest regional city/airport Bangkok becomes more and more the de-facto hub for all SEA travel. With the new road connections from China, this would boost travel and investment into Lao too, no doubt. Now if ASEAN could just do something about Burma…A very interesting perspective on Thai culture and the lack of any real political progress in the last decades. Even more interesting now that there are signs of yet another coup in the works this week (more here). If you could clean up the sex trade and straighten out the government processes in Thailand, it might just be heaven on earth. Dare to dream…Wow!! Let me get this right…thousands of factories close in China in the previous two financial quarters and Thailand, as the regional investment hub for SEA, has 5.7-6% per quarter growth! Well, fancy that. If you've ever done business in Thailand you know a couple of things. First, it's a great place to go on vacation. Second, Mandarin and Cantonese are just as useful as Thai when talking with most factory management. And third, investment, ownership and raw materials are, in large part, all coming from China.

2008 Global Competitiveness Rankings. China and the rest of SEA are just eating up the European countries and Singapore may just knock the US out of it’s 15-year top spot next time around. Brief article here. Methodology and details here. The world it is a changin'.

And finally a not-directly-related-to-SEA piece of news; more on the impacts of the quake to Chinese and global finance here.