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increase and one way of increasing is investing in each other.

One way to support to encourage increasing of the investment
is more trade among ourselves, more than 25 percent. The EU
is almost 70 percent, NAFTA in North America is more than 60

percent, we just have 25 percent.

It is difficult to sustain an economic community when

only one fourth of your trade is with each other and the
remaining 75 percent you trade with the world, with China,
Japan, EU, or US, but not among ourselves. That’s why

movement of skilled workers is essential and critical, and it
is necessary to help and move ASEAN, integration of ASEAN

community-building forward. Most of the workers floating on
the ASEAN landscape are unskilled workers. What’s the reason
for that? That is because of the discrepancy in economic

development and because of the modality of our industrialization
and our economic development. For the past 4-5 decades, one

of the attractions of ASEAN countries was cheap labor; availability
of cheap labor. When the Taiwanese, the Japanese decided to
relocate factories into the area around and moved to Bangkok,

it began Nakornpathom, Samutprakarn, Pathumthani, and
Rangsit. The first wave moved in because we could offer an

abundance of cheap labor, because workers can walk away
from their farms into the factory, because they didn’t need
much training, e.g., they need to know how to use a screw

and to know black from white so that they can connect a wire

Policy Forum 27

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