Summary:

ASEAN economies are presently negotiating the regional Digital Economy Framework Agreement which is touted to raise the potential value of the regional digital economy to USD2 trillion by 2030. To achieve this, the countries will have to reconcile their naturally diverse interests and an existing pool of agreements. To disentangle this noodle-bowl of ASEAN digital trade provisions as ASEAN economies engage in negotiations for the regional Digital Economy Framework Agreement, Natural Language Processing methods were applied to a corpus of 37 trade agreements with ASEAN member participation.

While it is expected that some divergence occur across countries, the analysis on ‘procurement’ issues finds stark differences in the policy positions of different agreements. These divergent policy positions can be found even within agreements signed by a single party, notably, Singapore. Time is also a key factor, as seen in the red and blue clusters, agreements that are signed relatively closely in time tend to be more similar. Lastly, multilateral agreements such as the RCEP and CPTPP diverge more from other agreements.

Article By TAN, Kway Guan

Graphic By GE, Yixuan