HCI 2009_H2_HIST Prelim_P2

HISTORY 9731/02 PAPER 2 History of Southeast Asia c.1900-1997 22 September 2009 3.0 hours Additional Materials: Answer Paper READ THESE INSTRUCTIONS FIRST Write your name and CT on all the work you hand in. Write in dark blue or black pen on both sides of the paper. Do not use staples, paper clips, highlighters, glue or correction fluid. Section A Answer Question 1. Section B Answer any three questions. At the end of the examination, fasten all your work securely together. All questions in this paper carry equal marks. This document consists 4 printed pages. [Turn over 1 HWA CHONG INSTITUTION HWA CHONG INSTITUTION College 2 Preliminary Examination 2009 General Certificate of Education Advanced Level Higher 2

Section A You must answer Question 1. ASEAN AND REGIONAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT 1 Read the sources and then answer the question. SOURCE A Achieving this end-goal of an ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) may appear daunting at first glance but ASEAN is not starting from scratch as some of the building blocks towards an economically integrated ASEAN are already in place. Existing ASEAN economic integration programmes such as the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA), the ASEAN Framework Agreement on Services (AFAS) and the ASEAN Investment Area (AIA) are currently being implemented to eliminate intra-regional barriers in the movement of goods, services and investments. In other words, the formation of an AEC should be seen as a logical next step up the economic integration ladder. An excerpt from an article by Denis Hew, “Build an ASEAN Economic Community Step by Step”, The Business Times, 15 June 1997. SOURCE B The existing low level of intra-ASEAN trade has always been the rallying point for the ‘regionalists’, who strongly advocate a rapid growth of intra-regional trade in order to diversify the region’s market base and to reduce its over-dependence on the industrialised countries. However, the intra-ASEAN trade since 1976 has simply failed to take off in real terms and remains stagnant at around 15 percent level, despite the implementation of some regional trade liberalisation measures. In a sense, the sluggish expansion of intra-regional trade in ASEAN brings to the fore the inefficacy of the technique of trade cooperation adopted by ASEAN. A study by the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation on ASEAN issued in 1983. 2

SOURCE C The data bears out the limited effectiveness of AFTA. First, intra-ASEAN trade has accounted for only about one-fifth of ASEAN’s total trade, this share remained stagnant over the last decade (and much of the intra-ASEAN trade is due to Singapore), at the expense of its increasing trade linkages with the two Asian giants China and India. Intra-ASEAN trade is also far lower than other regional economic alliances such as the European Union (two-thirds) or the North Amer