Some professors at the University of Asia and the Pacific were fortunate to listen to a talk by prominent Filipino journalist Eddie Lachica in a recent Round Table Discussion held at the Center for Research and Communication, think tank of UA&P.  Mr. Lachica, who is now based in Washington, D.C., USA, proposed some practical ways of overcoming some remaining obstacles to economic integration within the forthcoming ASEA Economic Community (AEC).  He alerted us against thinking that AEC will descend on our region in one fell swoop in 2015.   A long-time scholar on the ASEAN (he spent time at the Harvard University as a Nieman fellow) he is cautiously optimistic about the prospects of the AEC as a free market for goods, services, capital, technology and manpower.   He emphasized the importance for the private business sectors in the ASEAN to exert “peer pressure in order to induce the Member States to work on trade and industrial policy reforms, even though they don’t necessarily advance at the same pace and may have to settle for results short of complete integration.”