Asean Corporate Network

Figure above shows the Full ASEAN Network

The ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) is critical to the regional economic integration agenda in ASEAN, offering opportunities to over 622 Million People. One of the mandates of the AEC include the development of a “Global ASEAN” by enhancing competition, innovation, and dynamism in the region.

In this project, we quanlified and quantified the Trans-ASEAN integration, cohesion, and innovation using interlocking board directorates in the regional corporate network. The corporate network model relationships between firms based on economic ties, trade, ownership, etc. The interlocking doctorates connect top decision making bodies of the economy in a “social network”. We then used network science tools to identify the power and advantage of the firm (node centrality) and to market consolidation in a country (community detection)

We found out that Malaysia is critical in the Trans-ASEAN network because it serves as a “hub” for most ASEAN firms. Aside from that, its network structure indicate that it is robust and resilient to targetted attack. On the contrary, Indonesia seem to be the most fragmented environment. There are less connections/ collaborations making the transfer of “best” practices and influence inefficient. Lastly, we found that despite the differences in economic indicators like Ease of Doing Business and GDP per capita, the Philippine market closely mimic that of Singapore’s.