State-owned enterprises (“SOEs”) and politically favored private enterprises (“PFPEs”) continue to shape the competitive landscape of Southeast Asia. While ASEAN competition laws claim to prevent anticompetitive conduct, they entrench “public interest monopolies,” exclude sovereign acts from scrutiny, and defer oversight to specialist regulators. The ASEAN Regional Guidelines on Competition Policy stand only as soft law, omit state-aid control, and offer no means of enforcement.
This Article maps the doctrinal and institutional costs of that dual underreach. A survey of ASEAN competition laws exposes how exemptions recalibrate entry conditions and price formation. The result is an uneven playing field in which SOEs and PFPEs enjoy opaque subsidies and exclusive mandates, while private rivals absorb heavier compliance burdens. To address this, the Article proposes a treaty-level ASEAN Competitive Neutrality Framework that reclassifies unilateral state advantages as competition concerns, imposes binding transparency and subsidy rules, and links enforcement to the 2019 ASEAN Economic Dispute Settlement Mechanism. Without such reforms, ASEAN’s vision of an integrated, innovation-driven market will remain undermined by legal gaps that protect incumbents under the banner of public welfare.