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An overview: liberalization of the services and labor market
in the ASEAN

Part of the ASEAN’s trade and economic liberalization

agenda is the liberalization of services as envisioned in the
AEC 2015 and AEC 2025 Blueprints. This has generated a

confusing set of acronyms: AFAS, MRAs, AQRFs and MNP.
Unlike trade liberalization for industrial and agricultural goods,
trade liberalization in services requires a different set of trade

liberalization measures. Services cannot be containerized,
shipped and subjected to the usual tariff and customs rules.

Some clarification is clearly in order.

From GATS to AFAS:
How services became globally tradeable?

Until the 1970s and 1980s, the general discourse on

global trade was overwhelmingly focused on trade in industrial
and agricultural goods. Thus the original agreement was called
the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). From the

end of World War II up to the 1980s, GATT had undergone a
series of modifications under various rounds of global trade

talks, all of which were supposedly based on the general
framework of market opening or liberalization.

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