This book reviews progress with regional cooperation and integration in Asia and the Pacific and explores how it can be reshaped to achieve a more resilient, sustainable, and inclusive future. Consisting of papers contributed by renowned scholars and Asian Development Bank staff, the book covers four major areas: public goods, trade and investment, financial cooperation, and regional health cooperation. The book emphasizes how the region can better leverage regional integration to realize its vast potential as well as overcome challenges such as the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.

On 28 July 2008, the ASEAN Studies Centre and the Regional Economic Studies Programme, both of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung organized a roundtable on The ASEAN Economic Community Blueprint. The brainstorming session gathered Southeast Asian experts from the region to discuss the AEC Blueprint, which ASEANs leaders had adopted at their summit meeting in November 2007, and the prospects of any obstacles to its implementation by the target year, 2015. The roundtable started with a progress report on the AEC Blueprint given by S. Pushpanathan, Principal Director of Economic Integration and Finance, ASEAN Secretariat, Jakarta. Thereafter, the sessions examined the various aspects of the Blueprint tackling the non-tariff barriers, designing a comprehensive ASEAN Investment Agreement, a regional framework for competition policy, the role of infrastructure development in economic integration, the importance of international production networks in economic integration, etc.

This book seeks to explain two core paradoxes associated with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN): How have diverse states hung together and stabilized relations in the face of competing interests, divergent preferences, and arguably weak cooperation? How has a group of lesser, self-identified Southeast Asian powers gone beyond its original regional purview to shape the form and content of Asian Pacific and East Asian regionalisms? According to Alice Ba, the answers lie in ASEAN's founding arguments: arguments that were premised on an assumed regional disunity. She demonstrates how these arguments draw critical causal connections that make Southeast Asian regionalism a necessary response to problems, give rise to its defining informality and consensus-seeking process, and also constrain ASEAN's regionalism. Tracing debates about ASEAN's intra- and extra-regional relations over four decades, she argues for a process-driven view of cooperation, sheds light on intervening processes of argument and debate, and highlights interacting material, ideational, and social forces in the construction of regions and regionalisms.