Investing in Asean through S'pore

IMAGINE you are a fund manager sent back in time to 1967 and charged with convincing a large group of investors to put their money in a fund based on the idea that South-east Asia would one day be a stable, cohesive economic region.

Few back then would have ever imagined this part of the world would be the global bright spot it is today. That same year, a group of senior ministers from five South-east Asian nations gathered in Bangkok to form what we know today as Asean, the Association of South-east Asian Nations.

Asean states were then more concerned with the political turmoil, which was blighting the region, than a pie-in-the-sky notion of regional economic growth. An ongoing war against communism in Indochina, racial and sectarian issues across the Malay archipelago and political instability in some of the world's poorest countries meant South-east Asia was not a region where one would expect to see a great deal of economic integration.