ASEAN remains in need of infrastructure investment to drive growth and better connect the region’s markets. This is even more salient as countries seek to recover from the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. The Singapore Institute of International Affairs (SIIA) and the Asian Bureau of Economic Research (ABER) in partnership with the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA) held a virtual discussion on ‘Delivering Infrastructure and Connectivity in ASEAN’ yesterday.
Discussants agreed that infrastructure is a critical element in regional cooperation and will be a vital element in the recovery from the pandemic. However, countries will be in a weaker fiscal position and will not be able to fund all the necessary infrastructure projects. The private sector will need to play an important role in infrastructure financing.
This roundtable is the fourth in a series of dialogues on ‘ASEAN Centrality: Towards Regional Collective Leadership and a Global Voice’. The objective of this initiative is to enhance the understanding for the need for ASEAN centrality and to ally it to regional collective leadership by working with Asia’s middle powers to advance a global voice on key issues.
