 let's get started. Thank you very much for joining us today. The idea of the session is that we can share with you a little bit more about a recent survey that the forum has conducted into the youth of ASEAN and the way that the youth is thinking about their future and particularly about the wider region, the ASEAN region, and what their views are towards the integration story happening in ASEAN, whether it's something they believe in, they think it's positive, and how that translates into policy priorities for government leaders and others in the region. I will be joined up on the stage by another two panelists if you like. The first is Nick Nash to my left. Nick is the group president of a company based in Singapore called Sea Group. It's recently rebranded up until last week. It was known as Gorina, but it's now known as Sea, and it's an IT company involved in shopping and online gaming and various other and payments, a whole portfolio of different internet activities. And when we did this survey, we actually worked in partnership with Nick and we used his online platform, which reaches almost 80 million people across ASEAN, so we thought that this was a fantastic way to connect with the youth. I think all of you are aware that the youth of ASEAN are increasingly connected to the internet. There's about 320 million people already online. That's growing by about 124,000 a day, so the online population is growing at an incredible pace, and so the youth in particular are connected, and we thought that this was a very appropriate way to reach out to the youth and to try to get their views. So we're very grateful to Nick and to Sea Group for helping us with that. Just a little bit of context to this survey. The World Economic Forum runs a group called the ASEAN Regional Strategy Group, and this is made up of 15 CEOs, 10 ASEAN government ministers, and some academics and other voices. And the idea is this regional strategy group, because it's made up of business and government and academia, it's a group that shapes the thinking at the forum about Southeast Asia and shapes our agenda and what we should be doing in the region, how we can use the World Economic Forum platform to try to do good things in the region. And Nick is actually one of the members of our regional strategy group, alongside many other business leaders. And one of the things that the group suggested we do is try to get a flavour of what the youth of ASEAN think, what are their priorities, and in particular how do they view the ASEAN integration process. And so that was the origins of this survey. We did it over the past few weeks, and we had a very good response. We've got nearly 24,000 respondents across six ASEAN countries, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam. 70% were men, but 30% were females, so not a perfect gender balance, but I think reasonably representative of both genders. And it was young. The typical age of the respondents was about 18 to 20, in fact, between 16 and 22. So it was definitely reaching out to young people. And I think what was important was that they had a mixed background. About half of them have a university degree, and the other half do not. So it's not only the educated, the wealthy or the elite, it's a much broader spectrum of people. So I think it is given the numbers there, truly representative of ASEAN youth. And there were some very interesting results that came out. And I'll just run you through some of them, but you have the, if you can't see the slides, then you do have the deck in front of you. In fact, I think it's very unlikely you'll be able to see the slides. I mentioned the growth of the online population here, and that's clearly reflected in this set of results here. With so many people, so many of the young people moving online, it's unsurprising to see that they spend a significant part of their lives living through and on the internet. About a third spend more than seven hours a day on the internet, and more than half collectively spend more than five hours a day. So this is a generation really living their lives online and through digital platforms, which again, I think is another reason why we wanted to connect with them for this survey through the internet. So they live their lives online, and increasingly, that's where they get their information. That's where their trusted source of news comes from. And the chart on the left here compares old school media like television and print with new sources like Facebook and YouTube and Instagram and so on. And you can see that considerably more now get their sources of news from online platforms rather than traditional media. 63% say they get their news and information from Facebook. So clearly this region is transforming at incredible speed and embracing new forms of interaction and new sources of intelligence and information, and policymakers need to recognize and respond to that. We asked, we've sort of probed into this a bit further, and we wanted to find out how important it was for the youth of ASEAN to sort of keep up with information and to be connected globally. And I think that the results are very supportive of the view that they are becoming increasingly globalized. They are not thinking only in terms of their local community or their local country. They are plugged into what's happening at a bigger scale. And the charts you can see here show you that a significant proportion, find keeping up with global news, very, very important. And I think what's even more important is that many of them feel that globalization is a force for good. They feel that the flow of information and goods and people around the world is positive for them and positive for their society. That's obviously a different narrative to what you see playing out in other parts of the world. You look at Europe, you look at America, there's a lot of distinctly anti-globalization flavor feeling. But here in ASEAN, and I suspect in the wider Asia region, but certainly our survey in ASEAN suggests that globalization is still perceived as something that's beneficial to their lives and delivering positive change. So I think that was something that was perhaps a little bit surprised us, the positive feeling towards globalization. When we look at how they feel about their lives, I think another important thing that came out of the survey was a sense of optimism and positivity. Most people, most young people, feel confident in ASEAN that their lives will be successful. They look ahead and they see they have reason to be optimistic. They think that their lives are going to go well. About nearly 70% think that they can have a better life than their parents and that's always a traditional measure of rising middle class and growth in prospects and so on. Whereas in the West now, if you ask youths, you get a lot of them saying that they don't expect to have a better life. I think in ASEAN that optimism is still firmly in place. People do believe that the future is bright and I think that's very important again for policymakers and that they feel there's opportunities to make a difference and to improve their lives. So ASEAN youth on the whole is quite optimistic and I suppose you'd expect that to be the case given that it's a region of strong growth and reasonably good prospects. Then we went on and we asked youth about how they feel about ASEAN and this is perhaps I think where we were most surprised in the sense that there was very high levels of awareness about ASEAN and the ASEAN integration project. So 90% of the young people had heard about ASEAN, they heard about it from a variety of different sources from the news, from school, from friends and so on, but there was very high awareness and in line with that there was a very strong sense, a very strong belief that ASEAN was going to be positive for their lives and it was going to deliver positive change. So three quarters of people said that they felt that their country would be better off by being in ASEAN and furthermore we asked them whether at a personal level they felt being part of ASEAN was good and their two thirds said yes we believe that being part of ASEAN will make my career better and my job prospects better. So this is a very interesting result because I think there's a general narrative that the youth and the population generally in ASEAN don't really follow it, don't understand it, aren't really aware of it and if they are aware of it and not particularly positive but our survey suggests that's not the case, there's high awareness and people feel optimistic and positive about it. So if you're a policymaker and maybe in the past you've been concentrating on just raising awareness around ASEAN now perhaps it's a time to move from building awareness to action to actually driving integration at a faster pace and in a more meaningful way. Of course building awareness will continue to remain important but maybe now's the time to move beyond that and be a bit more ambitious in the integration aspirations. Just a few final things to mention we asked people whether they felt part of an ASEAN community, 70% agreed yes we're part of an ASEAN community, we asked people again linked to globalization how confident they feel to compete in a global world and the vast majority feel that they are able to compete. So there is this strong sense of being open and integrating with the world and particularly the region is going to be beneficial for them. I'll skip over this slide there is this is more about asking what do the youth use the internet for obviously shopping and information. The chart on the right there shows you that this asks about online or shopping habits whether you largely shop online or offline or both you can see that as this young population becomes more internet connected online and e-commerce is growing significantly and we're really at the start of that story as more and more people join the internet. I wanted to end just with a few more I suppose quirky things that came out of it. In ASEAN food is is always very important every country has its own food and every country is fiercely proud of their own food and rightly so ASEAN has fantastic food and we know that if you ask any ASEAN citizen what's their favorite food in general I'll always say their own food but in our survey we asked them to name not only their first but also their second favorite and what you can see on the slide here is their second favorite so it strips out the sort of the bias of of that choosing their home and there's a clear winner ASEAN citizens love Thai food they pick their own food as a number one but when picking a second food generally they will pick Thai of course in Thailand they have to choose a different one outside their country and there they choose Singaporean and that may well be that they love Singaporean food Hainanese chicken rice and things like that or it may well be that having visited Singapore they've experienced Singapore hawker centers which are very good and and have a whole variety of food so we're not sure exactly what that means but there's certainly I think some interesting interesting stories there that you can explore or could just be that Singapore has good Thai restaurants it could be that Singapore is good Thai restaurants yes and then the final thing just to mention we asked the ASEAN youth which countries they admired the most and in first place was Singapore second place was Thailand and in third place was Vietnam so some interesting results there and I think one of the things that we're hoping to do at for the ASEAN regional strategy group at the forum is to conduct this survey more frequently perhaps on a yearly basis and then we can track trends over time and see how perceptions around ASEAN and other things indeed change from year to year so that's just a brief look at the results let me hand over to Nick to share some of his own interpretations around this good morning everyone my name is Nick Nash I'm the group president of C which is the combined entity of the Garina entertainment platform Shopee for e-commerce and air pay for financial services it's our great pleasure and honor to to partner with my friend Justin in the forum to help do the survey and we've made a commitment to the forum to help with this on an annual basis to really track the growth of ASEAN's evolving consumer tastes and as important the the deepening we hope of the ASEAN interconnectivity I'll make two observations both of which are quite optimistic and quite positive the first is we share and cherish the observation that Justin has made about the optimism of Southeast Asia and it does in fact in many ways tell a different narrative than what is often described as a disillusionment perhaps among millennials and among generation Z quite the opposite I think there's a tremendous sense of enthusiasm for what the future will bring and as much so a sense of shared destiny and a sense of hard work that will be required to get there we find that very gratifying and I think very optimistic for the future I think secondly we feel that as Justin points out the time has now come to move from shared consensus building around ASEAN which is now mission accomplished to shared action taking and growth around what the ASEAN story and destiny means in a particular we would highlight the fact that in a world where the vast majority of young people seek to get their news and their shopping and their entertainment through the internet and mobile more specifically that probably has implications for economic structures and models whether it be ownership limits in different countries or the way in which trade happens it feels to us more and more that a shared ASEAN destiny is beginning with an online foundation and how we think about the way in which we support entrepreneurs the way in which we support economic growth probably has opportunities to adapt and evolve to reflect this wonderful connected Southeast Asian region so with that thank you again Justin for for your tremendous efforts on this and we look forward to doing this on a very annual basis I'd like to open it up to to to you and to see if there's any questions that you might have about the survey or the evolution even of of the the the online world in Southeast Asia yes I'm Silvita from BTVU so you are always you know the use of ASEAN in my Singapore Thailand and Vietnam the most why they admire those three countries the most what what what kind of thing they just looking for the food or study what what what kind of things well it's interesting we Nick and I were talking yesterday and we realized that in designing the survey we'd asked about food but there are indeed many many other things that we could have asked about which country do you admire for its manufacturing or for its fashion or for many many other things that and I think in future we will explore a bit more in detail some of the things that people do admire about different countries the question you're referring to was just very very top level which country do you most admire and we didn't ask them why we didn't ask which aspects of the countries they admire so trying to work out why they chose particular countries would be pure guesswork but in the case of of Singapore for example it's clearly been the most successful in terms of driving economic development it has the highest per capita GDP and so it may well be that you look at what Singapore's achieved find that admirable and that may be the reason but we'd be speculating because I don't actually know why people are making those choices Nick I think that's very wisely put Justin and perhaps it's a good encouragement for us a next year survey to add a few more questions around why they might feel that way but I would hypothesize that those three countries are also amongst the leaders in Southeast Asia in openness whether it's for tourism whether it's for business connectivity supply chain connectivity is in the case of Thailand so in many ways perhaps our youth are telling us something which is that they link respect and they link admiration to a degree of interconnectivity and openness at a country level and I suppose the more open a country is the more likely is that someone from a different country will have heard about you interacted with you know about you and so that openness creates connections understanding which may then feed through into recognition and admiration any any other questions yeah I am Jessica from eco business in Singapore I'm really curious about this part of the survey where you say there are opportunities for me to make a difference in my society as a publication that's concerned on sustainable development I would really be curious as to like what any details of what they mean by make a difference is that in support of for example sustainable development ASEAN or is it supporting responsible businesses in what way do they feel they can make a difference well the question again was was fairly open-ended it was but I think the idea was that we wanted to explore whether millennials feel that they should their their role in life their career their job should be delivering more than just a financial return to themselves should it be delivering a wider social return to society and you know we often hear from surveys in other parts of the world that millennials now feel that they should have more of a purpose to their job rather than just earning an income and we wanted to just sort of explore a little bit within an ASEAN context whether the use of ASEAN also feel that sense of purpose that they want to be doing doing good as well as as as helping themselves and I think the results suggest that that is the case there is a growing sense of community and the wider society and the fact that the use of ASEAN feel they should be doing work that has a broader purpose than just earning income I think that's that's well put and if you parse the question it says there are opportunities for me to make a difference in my society so effectively there's two parts that are linked together in an and statement one is there are opportunities for society to improve and there are opportunities for me to be a part of it and I think in many ways you're capturing some of the correlation to the fact that people feel more connected they feel more included they feel more inclusive about personally playing a role to make a difference rather than simply driving by every day and we found that very optimistic and very very very positive Do you do do you find that your business is growing at tremendous speed you're you're a new young company hiring young people do you find within your business that the people you're trying to recruit have that sense of purpose beyond just having a job it's extraordinary it really is and you know I would say that we feel blessed that in a time of peacetime there's never been a greater sense of mission orientation here in southeast Asia that's a great thing that absent some sort of dramatic crisis that's befalling all of us our youth have a real sense of purpose to to really improve the life for themselves and I'll share with you just one simple data point in our business which is you know oftentimes when we pay an employee a bonus or when their equity has achieved some degree of value over time we often ask them what do you plan to do with that and one of the most common things we hear is I'd like to buy a slightly better apartment from mom and dad and that just I think gets to the heart of the optimism of this region in a sense of filial piety but at the same time a sense of reinvestment in our communities which is very positive any other questions you'd like to put okay well let's wrap this up Nick thank you very much so we have a final one final question two questions perhaps my name is Jinpanyuan I'm from Pin and TV I have two questions first of all why do you select a sample from only six countries you exclude Myanmar Cambodian Brunei and the second question is that most of the youth in the survey they realize the news on for example YouTube Facebook website or Instagram and and do they mention how the reliability of the news that they got from those platforms because right now the trends of the fake news on online is keep increase keep increasing so so do they mention how they filter the news how do they think it is the fake news or it is the news that they should rely on yep um before we answer just to welcome Ibu Mary Pangestu to the to the stage professor of international economics at the University of Indonesia um I'm happy to take the first question yes please it's entirely my fault on the first one mea culpa because our business tends to have a greater concentration of users in those particular six countries and we felt that we would not be able to deliver a statistically rigorous sample group of enough scale to for the data to be meaningful to share with you in countries like Laos Cambodia Myanmar now we have begun developing a user base in Myanmar and I sincerely hope we'll develop you the two over time in which case we will be the first to offer that user base to Justin for future surveys what one interesting thing to add though is that although the respondents come from those six countries um there was one of the questions asked people what their nationality was and there was a significant minority of people who came from the four countries you mentioned that are not in the survey like Myanmar and Cambodia every night in Laos that were working in Singapore or Malaysia or Indonesia and I think it suggests that um there is already um in many ways a high degree of cross cultural integration you do have many ASEAN citizens working in other countries that are not their home country um and obviously that's much more the case in some countries than others but the results uh if you look at for example the people from Indonesia they're by no means the respondents are not all Indonesian there are many other ASEAN nationalities working there and that's the same across the board so um we can't we there weren't enough results to be statistically significant for those countries but there were and many of them working in the in the countries um in terms of the in terms of the the fake news um I don't know if if Ibu Mary whether the question is that the ASEAN youth of today look to online sources for their news and their information like Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and so on and um questions around whether that's reliable and whether that could lead to some issues in ASEAN that we see in other markets where the the trust associated with news um is is being eroded yeah I think the issue of uh where youth is getting their information was actually one thing that I had in in we had in mind when we were doing the survey and uh similar surveys of millennials in other countries have shown that uh what they do is they tend to visit sites which reinforce their view you know so the the question being you know are we seeing a generation that does is not open-minded and not knowing what else is going on in the world just because they're visiting sites which are only what they like and what it reinforce their view and I think there was a question on that I can't remember I remember there was a a question on that uh and I think it was like the quite a high percentage visit sites which reinforce their or what they're interested in what their views are and and that it's not so much about fake news but about you know the the ability for you to to be open-minded and and know uh the other the other side of the of a debate you know say like globalization for instance what was the half yeah yeah on half is it 46 46 percent uh exposes me to a new idea which is much higher actually than what they had found in the us or europe you know uh so that's good news so we are we are more open-minded so I think the way to to address fake news is your ability to be able to distinguish right which sites are actually delivering the right uh information uh and that your ability not to just go to the sites where that's finding to reinforce your views but to look at other sites so maybe that's that's a short answer to that and what we find is a practical day-to-day level is that an online piece of news whether it be a video clip or a small article or whatnot often is followed by a comments section so many people spend as much time reading the comments as they do the original piece which gives them a sort of sense of crowdsourced footnoting or on what may or may not be accurate or what may or may not be established fact yeah um unfortunately we have run out of time and I know that uh both both our panelists have to get to another session uh in just a few minutes so I'm going to draw this to a close but thank you very much for joining us and hopefully the the survey provides some some useful insights for you thank you thank you