"Introduction The Member States of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) set themselves the ambitious aim of establishing a region-wide economic community by 2015 and to deepen it in the context of the ASEAN Economic Community Blueprint 2025. In striving to achieve such ambitious objectives, there are strong reasons, both internal to ASEAN's own integration process and linked to the region's deepening ties with a dense layer of external economic partners, to believe that service sector reforms, and trade and investment in services more particularly, will occupy a place of choice in the region's policy pantheon"--