ASEAN has been urged to increase its intra-regional trade cooperation in order to be competitive with the rest of the world, and achieve its goal of economic integration by 2015.
Surin Pitsuwan, ASEAN secretary-general, made the remarks on Tuesday when addressing more than 200 investors from and beyond the ASEAN region at the Seventh ASEAN Finance Ministers' Investors Seminar.
"We have to make ASEAN attractive and welcoming for all players working to come onto our ASEAN landscape," said Surin, adding that the ASEAN Communities should make the faithful move.
Surin also noted that ASEAN was already working on that by improving its infrastructure linkages and the ease of travel.
The ASEAN Infrastructure Fund was created to support infrastructure projects in ASEAN to catalyze economic integration. While the target fund size is 800 million U.S. dollars, ASEAN states have pledged 335 million U.S. dollars to the fund to date.
Surin said that the region was fast to transform its centrality of goodwill to a centrality of substance in the post global financial crisis economic environment.
Investing in ASEAN would no longer be a work of charity, but a prospect of profit and benefits, added Surin.
Last year, non-residents earned a net profit and dividends of between 500 million U.S. dollars and 14 billion U.S. dollars across the various ASEAN countries.
Surin added that ASEAN emerged quicker than any other regions in the world from the crisis, and was attracting investors' attention.
Meanwhile, investors attending the meeting told Xinhua they hoped ASEAN could open its economy completely.
"It is a very dynamic region. In fact, we are getting a lot of multinational investors because they have already set up companies in other countries," said Bretton G. Sciaroni, an American lawyer.
Sciaroni added that people were not going to come all the way from Europe, the United States or North American just to look into Cambodia.
"They come in because of the region. So we are the beneficiaries of the group of ASEAN," said Sciaroni.
Raju C. Shah, a chartered accountant, said the Malaysian rules might be the challenges of investing in the country, but he stressed that Malaysia was definitely opening up.