Tag Archives: myanmar

Southeast Asia Trade Union Movement and its development

Posted on by

Southeast Asia profile on economic opportunities and development

SEASoutheast Asia is a region covering some parts of Indochina and Malaya Peninsula and islands around them.

The region is commonly categorized into two groups which are mainland of Southeast Asia including Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, and Southeast Asia maritime namely Brunei Darussalam, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Timor Leste.

Historically, the Southeast Asia has been at the crossroads of India and China, therefore we can clearly see traces of longstanding Indian and Chinese cultural influences. The hegemonic power of China (economy) is steady rise in this region, massive investment in-large scale infrastructure such as communications, roads and railway lines, construction and energy.

Geo-politically, Vietnam is rather different from other countries in this region and doesn’t share common characteristics of Southeast Asia nations because of China’s entrenched influence upon Vietnamese including their political ideology. This puts the country in significant position in making a closer relation between Chinese and other countries in the region. Geo-economically, influence China upon development and economic growth in general in Lao PDR is also significant in which the Communist has been injecting most of investments in the country.

Geo-political and –economical close cooperation has been established through ASEAN, The Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Ten (10) countries have joined this group. Meanwhile, Timor Leste has yet become a member of the association but declared itself to soon would be part of the group and recently after the ASEAN summit in April 2013, Secretary General of ASEAN Le Luong Minh stated that all member states now supported Timor-Leste’s admission to the Association. However, the ASEAN are pushing Timor Leste to qualify the obligations of the ASEAN’s three pillars, namely economic, political and sociocultural for their full membership.  Continue reading →