HorizonASEAN: How Are Southeast Asians Envisaging the Future?
A Commentary by David Black, Founder and CEO of Blackbox Research
As polling specialists, Blackbox is typically called upon to explore what’s going on in the moment; finding out what people are thinking and how they are behaving. While insightful, this kind of work does not always answer what people see as lying ahead.
Projecting the future can be a fraught exercise. However, today we live in a world where things move quickly, and the implications of change carry significant impacts for decision makers. This is even more important at a national or society level, where the stakes are high. Effectively signaling trouble ahead can often be the difference between success and failure for political leaders and policymakers.
Recently, Blackbox has worked to develop better polling mechanisms that can assist decision makers in ASEAN to navigate their way beyond the day to day. Through regular, in-depth polling and insights analysis we have been able to identify perceptual areas which are both fundamental and crucial to giving shape to the priorities that will determine future national success.
They are:
1. National economic management
2. National security/defence
3. The ability to provide adequate/affordable healthcare
4. Sustainable energy and climate change mitigation strategies
5. The positive use of technology and artificial intelligence
While education is also intrinsic, its contribution to predicting success has a mixed track record. As one example, high education levels in the old Soviet bloc did not translate or necessarily contribute to broader national success.
Here in Southeast Asia, we now monitor these five dimensions in terms of their relative importance to each country’s citizens, as well as how these citizens perceive their own country to be performing on each.
Our findings across the region help shine a light on the country-by-country match ups, as well as differences across key demographic segments. At the same time, the analysis offers more depth for leaders and decision makers looking to determine how best to spread their time, effort and investments.
What’s Important to SE Asians Today?
How are Southeast Asians viewing their future needs and how consistent is this? Our approach does not require people to trade off one thing for another. Instead, we score each precisely to ensure we can both rank dimensions but also explore what size the gaps are between each.
Blackbox’s HorizonASEAN scale, from the April 2024 wave of ASEANScan.
Our most recent analysis shows that national security and defence is viewed as the most important dimension for Southeast Asians generally, albeit in four out of the six countries we currently poll in. In Thailand and the Philippines, healthcare is viewed as most important.
Similarly, while Gen Z and Millennials identify national security and defence as most critical, this switches to healthcare once people get to the age of 35.
A crucial insight we have gleaned is that the relative gap between these dimensions is narrow. On a scale of 0-100 (where 100 is viewed as extremely important), the gap between the highest and lowest of these dimensions is less than 6 points. The gap is also narrower in those countries where the government has not changed for some time and is managed more from the centre (e.g. Singapore and Vietnam). The gap is widest in the Philippines where the tone and style of government has swung much more widely in the last decade.
Furthermore, the gap between dimensions is also narrower amongst younger adults but widens as people get older and become more discerning as to what they think really matters.
How Do SE Asians Think Their Own Countries are Performing Against These Dimensions?
The first thing to note is that among the six key countries in the region, Singaporeans are the most likely to rate their country’s performance across each dimension as being on par with how they rate the importance of each. In fact, Singapore is the only country where citizens score current performance above 65 across all five dimensions. This finding clearly aligns with Singapore’s stature as the most economically advanced country with the most stable governance in the region.
“This finding clearly aligns with Singapore’s stature as the most economically advanced country with the most stable governance in the region. ”
Breakdown of Singapore data in the HorizonASEAN report.
Second, except for Thailand and Malaysia, the majority of countries rate their own performance on national security & defence as the highest across the five dimensions, which signals a degree of confidence - at least when measured against how they are doing elsewhere.
Thais and Malaysians perceive their national performance on healthcare as best, possibly due to its level of affordability in these countries.
At the other end of things, Malaysians and Thais currently rate economic management in their countries as the weakest performing dimension. Again, this is consistent with other Blackbox polling undertaken since seen since the early stages of Covid, which consistently showed greater negative sentiment towards governance in the economic realm relative to other countries in the region. So, there is still a bit to do in these countries, which - notably - have both changed governments since the end of the pandemic.
Perceived progress on the advancement of AI is ranked lowest of the five dimensions in Indonesia and Philippines. Indeed, our data shows that Filipinos identify the biggest gap between importance and current performance on AI advancement overall. More broadly, Filipinos are much more likely to view current performance as weaker across all five dimensions vs importance, highlighting the stark reality that the Philippines still has some way to go in bridging citizen expectations.
Finally, Singaporeans and Vietnamese view their country’s current performance on sustainable energy and policies as weakest vs other dimensions. This may reflect higher expectations in these countries when it comes to addressing climate change and energy transition. Similarly, women across Southeast Asia rank national performance on sustainability lowest, whereas men rank AI advancement lowest.
Our findings on national performance demonstrate at least two important characteristics about Southeast Asia. Firstly, Singaporeans appear the most satisfied with how their country is performing today, highlighting their comparative comfort and satisfaction as to where things are heading. Secondly, despite a challenging global security environment, Southeast Asians (with the possible exception of Thailand) nonetheless view their governments as performing comparatively well when it comes to national security.
“Women across Southeast Asia rank national performance on sustainability lowest, whereas men rank AI advancement lowest.”
Decision Intelligence Takeaways: What The Analysis Tells Us
The data collected by Blackbox from its HorizonASEAN study is both helpful and illustrative of how Southeast Asians view the landscape today:
1. Despite recent shifts in regional economies, improvements in wealth and lifestyle, national security is still seen as paramount. For the most part, most SE Asians feel they remain reasonably well protected from external threats
2. The perceived importance of sustainability appears to be more closely tied to age, with younger citizens across the region ranking it higher. Similarly, sustainability appears to be an issue that carries more weight amongst women. This reinforces how acute the concern climate change and global sustainability issues are becoming to this generation.
3. Similarly, the positive advancement of AI is viewed more importantly amongst those aged 25-34. This likely reflects the fact that those in this age group maybe have more to gain and lose from AI professionally, with many job roles changing or disappearing altogether in coming years.
4. Country performance on sustainability and AI is still seen to be evolving relative to other dimensions. Typically, Southeast Asians rank their own performance on these two dimensions lower than national security, economic management, and healthcare, which have been more fundamental over a longer time period.
5. At this moment in time, Malaysia and the Philippines appear to have the most work to do to ensure they are properly tackling key issues in a way that is commensurate with expectations.
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