ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the economic integration of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) into a single regional market – and into global markets, networks of production and trade – intersects with specific forms of disability-based disadvantage in the region. It argues that new forms of regional and global integration exacerbate pre-existing disability-based inequalities and differences among people with disabilities themselves. Globalization has brought unprecedented opportunities for cooperation and competition at every scale. In the ASEAN region, substantive moves toward greater regional integration followed the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC). The crisis highlighted the region's vulnerability to external economic and political forces as well as the need to promote Southeast Asian countries economic cooperation and recovery. Employment opportunities are projected to increase with ASEAN economic integration. Cambodia has undergone rapid socio-economic transformation since the institution of a liberal democratic/free market economy in the early 1990s.
