ABSTRACT
The ASEAN Economic Community (AEC)'s main objective is to bring all member countries into a single market and single production base through several agreements to facilitate the free flow of goods, services, capital, investment, and skilled labor in 2015 and beyond. To explore the AEC opportunity, the Thai government has planned to develop the special economic zone as production bases and industrial estates in several border towns next to neighboring Lao PDR, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Malaysia, to take advantage of strategic locations and AEC agreements. Besides the zone-specific findings, the method presented herein creates an infrastructure evaluation index and border trade facilitation index to measure and compare the readiness and fitness of each special economic zone for different activity types by assigning them an easy-to-present index value. The chapter discusses the importance of infrastructure development and trade facilitation at border towns.
