Page 66 - ASEAN-EU Dialogue 2018: Regional and Inter-Regional Economic Cooperation: Identifying Priorities for ASEAN and the EU

Likewise, it would appear that employers and professional associations are not necessarily fully
involved in the implementation of the MRAs, although there are on-going efforts to increase
awareness at the level of the ASEAN Business Club and ASEAN Business Advisory Council
(Papademetriou et. al., 2015). However, for businesses to hire a foreign professional, it must
make economic sense in terms of the workers’ ability to contribute towards better productivity,
efficiency and higher profits for the firm, notwithstanding supply shortages. There are as yet,
not enough studies to show that this is the case for ASEAN, to motivate firms to move towards
hiring foreign ASEAN professionals, except in perhaps an acute labour shortage situation.

Conclusion
Although the AEC was launched in 2015, numerous targets in the AEC Blueprint were not met
and these were carried forward to the AEC 2025 vision (ASEAN Secretariat, 2015). Likewise,
the movement of skilled labour was also carried forward to the 2025 vision, to specifically
include the movement of business visitors who are engaged in trade in goods, services or
investments. It reiterates that the objective for facilitating the movement of skilled labour is to
allow these professional practitioners to practice in other AMS. The Consolidated Strategic
Action Plan for the AEC 2025 indicates that there are two main priority actions, namely to
expand and deepen commitments under the ASEAN Agreement on MNP where appropriate;
and reduce, if not standardise, documentation requirements (ASEAN Secretariat, 2018f).

The review in this chapter indicates that the issue of skilled labour mobility does not necessarily
lie in the commitments but in the implementation issues. While ASEAN has made progress in
this area, it has been slow and laborious. In particular, better data collection on the professional
workers who are actually working in each AMS is badly needed as the applications of
registered foreign professionals to work in another AMS may not fully capture the situation on
the ground. More studies are therefore needed to ascertain the actual extent of mobility and as
to whether ASEAN initiatives have contributed towards this mobility, however limited.
Though the reduction of documentation will be helpful in reducing bureaucratic delays, perhaps
greater attention to general principles of transparency and free information-sharing on
processes and procedures may help the professional workers to better understand what is
needed to work in another AMS.

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