Southeast Asia will struggle in the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’

Without regional collaboration

Member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) need to improve their collaboration to deal with the challenges of the socalled “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” the Asian Development Bank (ADB) said yesterday.

Based on a new joint report launched by the Manila-based multilateral institution and the World Economic Forum, the 11 members of ASEAN must think at the regional level, not the national level.

The report acknowledged the many existing national strategies for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, such as Thailand 4.0 or Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative.

The report, “ASEAN 4.0: What Does the Fourth Industrial Revolution Mean for Regional Economic Integration?” ADB noted that emerging technologies will reshape Southeast Asia in the future, thus ASEAN leaders need to prepare for the deep transformations that lie ahead.

The treatment of cross-border data flows, for example, is one of the pressing issues highlighted by the report. As data currently are prevented from flowing seamlessly across borders, new technologies such as telemedicine or the Internet of things will be limited in their potential.

The report has offered recommendations to ASEAN leaders to prepare their institutions for the forthcoming challenges associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The among the recommendations is for the ASEAN Secretariat to become a “platform organization” that allows for the integration of input from multistakeholder groups of experts and should delegate more activities to affiliated functional bodies.

Likewise, the ADB said long-term blueprints should be replaced with threeyear rolling plans, noting the speed of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, most forecasts, will quickly be outdated. ASEAN must be agile and allow for course correction.

The ADB also recommended the democratization and decentralization of policy formulation to make ASEAN’s policy-making process more inclusive, and a truly owned as well as managed by the people for their benefit.

The report added that ASEAN may also need to establish test beds for new approaches to regulation as a way to nurture multi-country experiments in shaping new technologies.

“Hire staff capable of running a platform model effectively. The staff must be well versed in managing the new Fourth Industrial Revolution tools and have a strong record in this regard,” ADB said.

Finally, the ADB said that ASEAN should adopt a new funding model to provide more financing for the regional secretariat’s operation.