Picture: Electronics factory workers in Cikarang Indonesia (© ILO/Asrian Mirza https://www.flickr.com/photos/iloasiapacific/8096440106/in/photostream/)

The heart of ASEAN’s regional economic connectivity, both in intra-regional and extra-regional trade, is the electronic and electrical (EE) industry — an industry that has provided millions of jobs and holds ASEAN’s importance in the global economy for decades. The last statistics published by ASEAN in 2015 stated that “electrical machinery and equipment and parts thereof; sound recorders and reproducers, television image and sound recorders and reproducers, and parts and accessories of such articles” the intra-regional total trade in ASEAN is USD 543,751 million and the extra-regional trade nearly tripled with the total amount of USD 1,726,558—the highest of all 99 forms of commodities. read more read more