Consumer law and policy generally envisages that consumer interests are best advanced by prohibiting abusive marketplace practices and promoting competition. This chapter proposes the framework be sophisticated for the provision of professional health services. Arguably, universal access to health services is a basic human right. Thus, the consumer interest is best understood within a human rights and a marketplace framework. These two frameworks do not always sit comfortably together, as illustrated in this chapter. The chapter explores the impacts of ASEAN’s market liberalisation strategies upon the delivery of professional health services. One strategy involves regional mutual recognition of health qualifications. This could enhance consumer interests by increased movement of medical practitioners to areas of regional need. Conversely, it could lead them to shift from low-income countries where universal access needs are acute to countries where practitioners receive higher incomes. The chapter concludes with an examination of how ‘health tourism’ is being promoted by some ASEAN members for economic benefit. However, these apparent benefits maybe somewhat illusory.

This volume chronicles the experience of ASEAN Member States in pursuing trade and investment liberalization in services markets. Using a multidisciplinary and comparative regionalism lens, drawing on law, economics and global political economy, it takes stock of ASESAN achievements to date in opening services markets; identifies a number of the challenges that the regional grouping can be expected to encounter on the way to realizing the AEC Blueprint 2025 aims; and situates such efforts against the backdrop of efforts at creating a European Single Market for services.

Chapter 4 provides a detailed reading of the progress achieved to date in the negotiated opening of services markets under both AFAS and PTAs entered into (or currently being negotiated) with third parties both by ASEAN as a whole and by individual ASEAN Member States.

Chapter 2 situates the role of services and services trade in the ASEAN economic landscape, providing a range of contextual metrics with which to gauge the contribution that services and services trade make to the region’s insertion into regional and global value chains and the overall regulatory and institutional setting in which such efforts proceed. It further investigates the actual (as opposed to negotiated) degree of openness of service regimes maintained in a sample of leading AMS, using a database developed by the World Bank Group.

Chapter 5 analyzes the richness of the European Union’s journey on services trade and investment, drawing possible lessons for the future of ASEAN institutional design in this area. It retraces the historical origins and jurisprudence-led evolution of the internal market rules governing trade and investment in services among an expanding group of advanced nations and explores how the experience gained in building the internal market both influenced and paralleled the EU’s engagement with the rest of the world in services trade.