ASEAN countries have benefited a lot from their association and the cooperation can be viewed from the following dimensions:

Economic and Functional cooperation:

When ASEAN was established, trade among the Member Countries was insignificant. Estimates between 1967 and the early 1970s showed that the share of intra-ASEAN trade from the total trade of the Member Countries was between 12 and 15 percent. Thus, some of the earliest economic cooperation schemes of ASEAN were aimed at addressing this situation. One of these was the Preferential Trading Arrangement of 1977, which accorded tariff preferences for trade among ASEAN economies. Ten years later, an Enhanced PTA Programme was adopted at the Third ASEAN Summit in Manila further increasing intra-ASEAN trade.

ASEAN cooperation has resulted in greater regional integration. Within three years from the launching of AFTA, exports among ASEAN countries grew from US$43.26 billion in 1993 to almost US$80 billion in 1996, an average yearly growth rate of 28.3 percent. In the process, the share of intra-regional trade from ASEAN's total trade rose from 20 percent to almost 25 percent. Tourists from ASEAN countries themselves have been representing an increasingly important share of tourism in the region. In 1996, of the 28.6 million tourist arrivals in ASEAN, 11.2 million or almost 40 percent, came from within ASEAN itself.

ASEAN has also entered into FTA (Free trade agreement) with countries like China where a mutually beneficial situation is being envisaged. China and Southeast Asian countries signed last Monday an historic agreement to create the world's largest FTA, embracing 1.7 billion people and trade worth 1.2 trillion US dollars. The FTA is expected to be complete in 2010 between China and the six of the ASEAN members of Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. Meanwhile, for the less-developed ASEAN nations of Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam, the completion of the FTA was pushed back until 2015.
We would like to further substantiate the example of ASEAN-China FTA and its implications. A county like Indonesia is going to benefit substantially with such an agreement coming into effect The Indonesian Ministry of Industry and Trade, predicted that the country could raise some 110 million US dollars in revenue from the export of agricultural and fish products to China when the agreement comes into effect.

Political benefits:

In 1992, the ASEAN Heads of State and Government declared that ASEAN should intensify its external dialogues in political and security matters as a means of building cooperative ties with states in the Asia-Pacific region. Two years later, the ASEAN Regional Forum or ARF was established. The ARF aims to promote confidence-building, preventive diplomacy and conflict resolution in the region. The present participants in the ARF include: Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Canada, China, European Union, India, Indonesia, Japan, Republic of Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Mongolia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, the Russian Federation, Singapore, Thailand, the United States, Vietnam.

Through political dialogue and confidence building, no tension has escalated into armed confrontation among ASEAN members since its establishment more than three decades ago.