Current status of ASEAN legal regulations on economic integration and the role of Vietnam

In implementing the ASEAN Community, economic integration is identified as the focus. The ASEAN Charter does not stipulate specific measures for ASEAN countries to build and implement the Economic Community, but sets out the general principles for building this Community, which are to comply with multilateral trade principles and ASEAN's rules-based mechanisms to effectively implement economic commitments and gradually reduce and eventually completely eliminate barriers to regional economic integration in a market-driven economy. Accordingly, the ASEAN Economic Community is established based on many different areas of extensive economic and trade cooperation such as: Trade in goods, trade in services, investment, competition policy, intellectual property, etc., in which trade in goods is the backbone of cooperation in the Economic Community. To date, the regulation of cooperation within the framework of the ASEAN Economic Community includes international treaties within the bloc and between ASEAN and its external partners as well as other legal documents that are not international treaties (hereinafter referred to as ASEAN legal regulations). Accordingly, the legal system of ASEAN on economic integration is quite large, with the largest number of documents compared to other integration areas in ASEAN.

As of September 2020, ASEAN has nearly 70 legal documents on economic integration (of which, there are 62 documents on intra-bloc economic integration). Among the legal documents on ASEAN integration, the integration documents between ASEAN and its external partners also have a profound impact on the implementation process of the contents of the Economic Community, for example: the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). However, in general, in this integration field, although there are many documents with more substantial content than other integration fields of ASEAN, there are also many legal documents that do not really have the content that brings deep integration value in accordance with the goals of the Economic Community. In the integration of the ASEAN Economic Community, this article only focuses on analyzing and clarifying the current status of ASEAN legal regulations regulating a number of key areas, determining the integration content of this community such as trade in goods, trade in services, investment, intellectual property.

1.1. Trade in goods

In the field of trade in goods, ASEAN previously had a number of legal documents such as: the Common Effective Preferential Tariff (CEPT) Agreement for the Free Trade Area (AFTA) in 1992, the Protocol amending the Common Effective Preferential Tariff (CEPT) Agreement for the Free Trade Area (AFTA) in 1995. However, in August 2007, ASEAN Economic Ministers agreed to strengthen the Common Effective Preferential Tariff Scheme implementing the ASEAN Free Trade Agreement (CEPT/AFTA). Therefore, the ASEAN Trade in Goods Agreement (ATIGA) was signed by ASEAN countries in February 2009 and took effect from May 17, 2010.

The ATIGA Agreement consolidates and harmonizes all provisions of CEPT/AFTA and formalizes a number of ASEAN decisions to become the only legal instrument in the form of an international treaty for state agencies as well as the private sector throughout ASEAN to apply and implement in the field of trade in goods.

The Annex to the ATIGA Agreement provides a full tariff reduction schedule for each member country and specifies the tax rates applied to each product line in each year until 2015. Accordingly, ASEAN countries will eliminate tariffs on most goods, except for unprocessed agricultural products at 0 - 5%. For the group of 04 countries Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam, the tax rate will be reduced to 0 - 5% for goods in the reduction list from January 1, 2009 and reduced to 0% from January 1, 2015. In particular, the tariff rate on unprocessed agricultural products will be reduced to 0% in 2013. The agreement clearly stipulates the number of tariff lines that will be deferred to 2018 for the four groups of countries above, and at the same time, allows for the suspension or adjustment of commitments to implement the obligation to reduce and eliminate tariffs among countries in the ASEAN bloc. In addition to the goal of eliminating tariff barriers, ATIGA aims at a common effort by ASEAN to maximally handle non-tariff barriers, customs and sanitary cooperation, etc., and at the same time, establishes the goal of harmonizing policies among ASEAN members in the context of building the ASEAN