LABOR MIGRATION FLOWS FROM VIETNAM TO THAILAND IN THE CONTEXT OF ASEAN REGIONAL INTEGRATION

International migration has been always an important and compound issue by virtue of it closely relates to various facets from political, social and economic development for regions and countries. In ASEAN, international migration has been always defined as one of the fundamental features in ASEAN’s development transition (Chantavanich, Ito, and Middleton 2013). Over the last decades, the region’s economies have achieved significant and impressive growth, becoming one of the most dynamic economic performance regions in the world as well as has become more widely integrated into the regional and global economics1. The rapid growth process has transformed fundamentally economic structure of many Southeast Asian countries with the greater contribution of industrial and service sectors instead of solely based on the agriculture sector over many centuries. The demand for skills in higher income countries in the region has grown, while there is a fall in birthrates with greying populations that causes an increasing shortage of labor such as Thailand. For the lower income ones, on the contrary, the youth populations are burgeoning, which lead to the unemployment and underemployment rate are dramatically increasing such as Vietnam and Philippines.

labor migration, Vietnam, Thailand, ASEAN, regional integration