Business in post-pandemic ASEAN: insights, challenges and opportunities

Despite the substantial and increasing corpus of business research on Asia Pacific business, the emerging ASEAN bloc of remains significantly under-represented. With a combined population of over 600 million, this cluster of Southeast Asian economies embodies, collectively, the world’s fifth largest market and covers some of the fastest-growing business contexts. It is also one of the most complex and diverse regions in a mosaic of cultures, religions, economies and regulatory profiles and political contexts. With the sudden shock triggered by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, many ASEAN-based organizations – even entire industries – faced a hitherto unseen host of challenges necessitating urgent innovation and learning. Within this context, many sectors witnessed rapid and complex change still largely undocumented in empirical academic research to date. In seeking to address this paucity, this collection offers some novel and exploratory research with important implications for how ASEAN business managers are grappling with these challenges, spanning topics such as robo-service technology, internal R&D and product innovation, export intensity, city branding for international retirees and micro-strategy formation.