Understanding of ASEAN economic community (AEC): Scale development and validation across Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam

This study develops and validates a new scale to explore the understanding of ASEAN economic community (AEC) among citizens of Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, three ASEAN member nations with contrasting levels of economic development and histories. Data were collected via self-administered questionnaires in three official languages (English,
Thai and Vietnamese). The final usable samples include 857 Singaporeans, 2,275 Thais, and 265 Vietnamese. The findings reveal both similarities and differences in the way people from these three nations understand AEC. From an initial pool of 14 items, the results from exploratory factor analysis suggested the elimination of four items that were not similarly perceived by people of these national groups. The remaining ten items that were consistently loaded into two similar factors across the three nationals revealed two underlying concepts. The first concept consists of five items, which reflect ‘Regional Competitive Integration’ (RCI), and the second concept comprises a group of five items indicating ‘Regional Economic Cooperation’ (REC). To assess scale reliability, validity, and measurement equivalence of these two concepts, a multiple group confirmatory factor analysis was conducted. The results show that both five-item scales of RCI and REC are reliable and valid as well as possess factorial equivalence or metric invariance. Therefore, future research can incorporate these two concepts into study related to the understanding of regional economic integration by adopting these newly developed scales and perform cross-cultural comparisons.