Deunden Nikomborirak commented that the study should take more explicit account of the impact of various free trade agreements that ASEAN has and the barriers that hinder trade expansion, such as the restrictive effects of the rules of origin in the ASEAN–Korea trade agreement. She also called attention to the weaknesses of the trade data used in the paper, and noted that intra-ASEAN trade is much underestimated: For example, there is a great deal of unrecorded cross-border informal trade between countries, referring to a recent Thailand Development Research Institute paper that has documented large-scale informal trade between Laos and Thailand.
Shigeyuki Abe emphasised the need to consider the role and nature of trade related to production networks and FDI, referring to the information available in Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry papers based on firm-level survey data. It is important to take into account how local procurement and local sales...