ASEAN urges mobility of workers

SINGAPORE - The World Bank says ASEAN countries can do more to increase mobility of workers moving from one country to another to further integrate the bloc and its economy.

As ASEAN seeks further integration, its members should lower barriers for their workers to move in and out of one another's countries, said the World Bank.

In doing so, they can reap benefits by spreading talent and know-how around ASEAN, one of the world's fastest-growing regions.

Workers also gain from such migration, which should be seen as "brain circulation" rather than "brain drain", the bank said on Tuesday.

Carefully managed migration processes are another key factor that can bring benefits, it added.

The measures it recommends to ease flows of such people include improving the information workers have about opportunities and rights and giving more data on skills shortages.

The ASEAN Economic Community has taken steps to ease such movements, like standardizing qualifications, the bank noted. This would allow engineers, nurses, architects, doctors, dentists, surveyors, accountants and tourism professionals from one ASEAN country to work in another if they meet certain requirements.

But these occupations make up just 5 percent of jobs in the region.

What this means is that worker welfare - a metric that includes wages and employment - would not rise as fast. If barriers go down for all workers, the increase would be 29 percent compared with 14 percent if only the higher-skilled ones are targeted, said the report.

Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand attract the bulk of migrant workers in the region, many of them lower-skilled. Altogether, they take in 6.5 million ASEAN migrants, 96 percent of the total.

Besides ASEAN, the only other region where the share of intra-region migration increased between 1995 and 2015 is East Asia and the Pacific. In ASEAN, it shot up by 10 percentage points.

The rise is due to differences in growth and population trends among ASEAN countries, said the report's lead author Mauro Testaverde, who is the World Bank's economist for social protection and labor for East Asia and Pacific.

The bank's chief economist for the East Asia and Pacific, Sudhir Shetty, added: "Labor mobility contributes to continued vitality in the region with benefits not only for migrants themselves but also for sending and receiving countries."

Countries that send out their workers get remittances and expertise, while those that take them in see their labor shortages addressed, boosting growth and the employment of their local workers, said the two experts.

The report suggests making entry requirements more transparent and to help workers track their progress toward admission.

Often, workers are ill-informed about opportunities and costs and may be exploited by recruitment agencies or employers charging high job-placement fees. ASEAN could address this with a common labor market information portal, the report said.

The Straits Times / ANN