Book excerpt: In the tradition of the Asia Competitiveness Institute (ACI) at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore (NUS), our research publications make a distinctive contribution to the understanding of economic development in Asia by evaluating and tracking competitiveness for the ten ASEAN member states annually since 2000 through combining leading-edge methodologies with an extensive dataset. In this third edition, the competitiveness ranking and simulation study for ASEAN-10 are improved and updated with 121 indicators across four environments. An in-depth assessment of the establishment of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) offers important implications for future integration initiatives in the broader Asia Pacific region. Novel empirical frameworks are also applied to provide an estimation of annual agricultural Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth in eight ASEAN economies and to shed light on the drivers of growth in the travel and tourism industry in Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand.