Southeast Asia: Latest analysis, insights and developments from the World Economic Forum

Southeast Asia hosts some of the world's most significant manufacturing clusters: electronics in Malaysia, Singapore and Viet Nam, automotive and chemicals in Thailand and an emerging electric vehicle battery value chain in Indonesia.

Those clusters could serve as coordination mechanisms — allowing co-located companies to share infrastructure, align on clean-energy procurement and pursue the energy transition at a scale individual firms cannot reach alone.

ASEAN is now the world's fourth-largest energy consumer and nearly 80% of its supply still comes from fossil fuels.

Economic pressure, geopolitical rivalry and technological disruption are reshaping Southeast Asia simultaneously, but their effects vary sharply across the region's ten economies.

Business leaders rank geoeconomic confrontation significantly higher than the global average, reflecting how directly the region sits at the intersection of competing powers.

Meanwhile, AI investment is accelerating unevenly: nearly half of large firms have begun scaling AI, while adoption among small and medium-sized enterprises, which employ most of the region's workers, stands at around 15% even in Singapore.

ASEAN's combined GDP grew from $2.5 trillion in 2015 to $4.3 trillion in 2025, while merchandise trade nearly doubled and foreign direct investment more than doubled. That record, built across repeated shocks (financial crises, a pandemic, and now a fractured global trade environment), reflects a consistent regional instinct to turn disruption into deeper integration.

The Asian Development Bank projects the region will grow 4.6% in 2026.

What's shaping Southeast Asia right now? Drawing on the World Economic Forum's network of leaders and experts, this tracker curates the latest insights, data and analysis from and on the region to help make sense of the news.