Revitalising ASEAN Economies in a Post-COVID-19 World

The following sections are included:

• About the Editor
• Contents
• Preface

COVID-19 highlighted the fragility of the sectors and the economies, tested by lockdowns and quarantines. This chapter aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on the Brunei Darussalam economy and its key sectors. Further, it explores the policy responses undertaken and their impact to control the COVID-19 transmission within Brunei. This analysis identifies the social and economic policy responses to COVID-19 and summarises the invaluable lessons learnt in the context of businesses, sectors, and the economy. It is observed that Brunei economy had a positive growth during the pandemic due to its effort to enhance economic diversification to overcome the challenges faced by high dependence on the oil and gas sector. It facilitated the growth of agriculture, forestry, and fisheries sectors, wholesale and retail sectors, communication sector, and non-oil and gas sector despite the restrictions of the pandemic. The outbreak underscored the opportunity for businesses, sectors, and government to prioritise dynamic policies to facilitate and operationalise new growth prospects, which were among the reasons for the growth of Brunei amidst the COVID-19.

Cambodia is among the countries with the lowest incidence rate of reported COVID-19 cases. However, the global economic turmoil is generating deep economic and social implications within its borders. This chapter discusses the emerging socioeconomic challenges along with the government intervention in response to the new scenario. The macroeconomic analysis covers the main channels whereby the Cambodian economy is deteriorating and discusses how the country’s rebound is subject to the performance of its major allies. Likewise, the chapter delves into the microeconomic effects, emphasising the subsequent social ramifications, especially among the most vulnerable demographics. It is argued that the current government measures are insufficient to mitigate the growing poverty levels and needs of the population.

As in all other countries in the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has shattered many aspects of life in Indonesia. The pandemic has caught everybody by surprise, unprepared to adapt to and mitigate the new crisis. This chapter attempts to show how Indonesia responded to the economic issues during the pandemic: how the government responded to relieve the economic suffering of the people, how individuals coped with the crisis, how business behaved to survive (including the use of e-commerce), and how resilient the macro-economy was. It is based on many scattered surveys, mostly conducted by Badan Pusat Statistik (BPS — Statistics Indonesia), on COVID-19. The data are mostly until end of December 2020. The discussion is preceded with the trend of the pandemic and change in population mobility. The chapter concludes that 6 months after the start of the pandemic, people’s mobility resumed closer to levels before the pandemic, and the economy was already improving, even as the number of daily infected cases kept rising. Some people and some businesses enjoyed economic opportunities during the pandemic, particularly those who could use online activities and practise tight health protocols.

The COVID-19 global infection has been recognised as an alarming pandemic threat in Malaysia since the second week of March 2020. The government was forced to hastily implement the Movement Control Order (MCO) to prevent the growing spread and terrifying health threat of COVID-19. The necessary lockdown measures drastically slowed down the economic growth of the country and caused an adverse impact on many industries, businesses, and households. Multiple stimulus packages have since been announced by the government towards securing and recovering the economy from the resultant effects of the pandemic. The stimulus packages were intended to provide coverage for both the welfare of consumers (demand side) as well as the producers (supply side). The objectives of this chapter are as follows:

• (1) To describe and discuss the impacts of the devastating COVID-19 pandemic based on selected macroeconomic indicators.
• (2) To review the existing economic policy on combating and mitigating the effects of the pandemic.
• (3) To propose some significant improvements and necessary modifications on the general economic policy.

We conclude that the severe adverse impact of the pandemic on the macroeconomy is very significant and extremely "game-changing". However, it shows some improvement with the implementation of the various stimulus packages throughout the year of 2020. We suggest that the government focuses on fine-tuning and strategising the economic policy that aims to encourage a sustainable growth in domestic spending, and consumer and producer confidence in its efforts of stimulating the economy.

This chapter analyses the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on the Malaysian tourism industry. The discussion starts with general development of global tourism, followed by the drastic changes in Malaysian tourism and the economic conditions before and during the pandemic. With support of updated statistics, this chapter further presents the disastrous strikes on domestic tourism value chain, hotel lines, and the aviation industry. The relevant policy responses and post-pandemic tourism recovery are also discussed for better understanding of the vulnerable ecosystem. This chapter concludes that the recovery is progressive along UNWTO’s Scenario 1 (before or by 2023) but subjected to domestic policy efficacy and global responses, especially the availability and affordability of vaccines. This chapter recommends proactive short-term policy initiatives in preparing the sector and its value chain to be COVID secure, and then launching marketing campaigns. For long-term strategic planning, the government should look into initiating and building capacity of digitalisation in the sector.

This study extends the existing literature on the use of financial stress index (FSI) to assess the financial condition of Singapore during the COVID-19 crisis. Specifically, a high-frequency FSI is constructed to provide timely analysis which is imperative given the pandemic is still lingering across the globe. There are two main uses of the FSI. First, we use FSI to detect episodes of financial stress and investigate whether Singapore’s financial system is facing frailty during the pandemic. Second, we use a vector autoregression (VAR) model to analyse the comovement between FSI, COVID-19 indicators, and global financial factors, which shed light on the main drivers underlying Singapore’s financial stress since the COVID-19 outbreak. Our findings suggest that (1) excessive stresses were detected during 9 March–21 April 2020, a period that corresponded to the evolution of COVID-19 into a global pandemic as well as the beginning of Singapore’s Circuit Breaker period; and (2) the dynamics of Singapore’s FSI is more due to the global financial factors than it is to the severity of the domestic COVID-19 condition.

COVID-19 has had tremendous ripple effect upon every sector in the system since its beginning in 2019. Not only the effect of the pandemic itself, but the preventive measures of the government also affected the system, especially the agriculture supply chain widely considered to be the most important part of Thailand. The aims of the research chapter were to investigate and analyse the effects of COVID-19 and government measures towards the fruit supply chain in Thailand, together with reviewing on-season longan as a case study. Consequently, the instrument utilised was the supply chain mapping. The result was collected additionally by in-depth interviews, focus-group interviews, and questionnaires from Thai farmers. As a result, COVID-19 pandemic and preventive measures indicated the entire fruit supply-chain system’s impacts on activities and stakeholders from start to finish nationally and internationally. Besides, the labour markets were affected, particularly seasonal foreign harvesting workers. These effects are in accordance with the agricultural overproduction, farm price and export price decreases, and other export volumes. In case of on-season longan, the shortage of fruit harvesting workers from disease preventive measures, including the prohibition of cross-border travel, were highlighted as significant problems. Additionally, the 14-day quarantine measure lessened the number of brokers, traders, and agricultural workers. These problems put pressure on involved people and changed the consumer behaviour. In sum, the noteworthy results lead to the policy recommendations for the new normal of the marketplace, comprising promoting comprehensive learning and training (reskill, upskill, and new skill) courses for agricultural practices and so forth.

Using an online survey with about 650 persons living in urban areas in Vietnam and working in different job positions, this chapter aimed to explore how they perceived various measures in containing COVID-19 and how they complied with and evaluated different government policies in controlling the pandemic. In particular, we disaggregated data of the urban workers into gender (male vs. female), job positions (wage-earners vs. other), social insurance participation (mandatory, voluntary, and non-participating), and self-rated health (good vs. bad). We found that the respondents highly appreciated the government with the provided information of COVID-19 and the implemented policies to contain the pandemic. People showed quite good compliance with the national social distancing policies since they went out of their homes mostly for essential work, while very rarely for other reasons or non essential work. We could see various differences in perceptions and compliance levels of the respondents in terms of age, gender, residential area, and health status. Based on those findings along with the existing studies, we recommended that appropriate measures stabilising social and economic activities within the country should be continuously implemented so as to maintain or alternate jobs for people working in severely affected economic sectors. Also, providing accessible and affordable healthcare measures to all people, especially for poor and informal workers who are particularly risky to infectious diseases, should also be given great consideration. Sufficient goods and services for people to meet their basic needs during social distancing should be continuously maintained.

This chapter — among the few in the world — examined how well the households were prepared to contain COVID-19 in Vietnam under the first national social distancing in late April 2020 by mapping their related indicators presenting living conditions. It used the provincial data from Vietnam’s Population and Housing Census 2019. Following Jones et al. (2020)’s approach, it constructed various readiness indicators for households in 63 provinces/cities in Vietnam in order to see how they were ready for the social distancing period. The results showed that Vietnam’s social distancing in late April 2020 was successful because it was applicable and implementable along with readiness of all households with sufficient resources. At the provincial level, however, there were differences in readiness levels, in which some provinces were consistently lower than the other. As such, supplementing social assistance policies during the social distancing period was timely and appropriate. This chapter concluded that, given its position as a middle-income country with limited resources and a population of nearly 97 million, Vietnam has been among the few countries in the world to successfully contain COVID-19 in a short time. Early interventions and timely social assistance measures combined with house-holds’ readiness strongly determined Vietnam’s success.

The following section is included:

• Index