Free Trade Agreement Between the GCC and ASEAN Executive Summary This paper is a consolidated report of surveys on key issues and concerns to trade and investment in an ASEAN-GCC free trade environment. The researchers were able to make a schema of most likely issues and concerns that would be deterrent to negotiations for a free trade agreement on the ASEAN and GCC zones. The consolidated report is based on an intensive literature review. As the ASEAN-GCC talks are still underway, the researchers thought it wiser to first create a schema for an enterprise survey which would assess the effectiveness as well as determine barriers which would inadvertently affect ASEAN-GCC free trade negotiations. A consolidated report on such factors would greatly benefit business enterprises as well as the government itself in that it provides a guidelines of expectations and, thus, this could be addressed early on. The report first discussed an overview of the GCC financial market to establish the market potentials and capacity of the region.
