Liberalisation of International Trade in Financial Services in Southeast Asia: Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand

This paper outlines the analytical rationale in favour of liberalisation of trade in services with particular reference to the key infrastrucutural sub-sectors of financial services and discusses the empirical evidence thereof. The paper goes on to offer an overview of the state of deregulation and the schedule of liberalisation of the two service sub-sectors in four middle-income Southeast Asian countries, viz. Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines. An attempt is also made to synthesize the individual country experiences and extract common themes from them.