This paper, through the further fusion of formal bargaining and collective action theories with the more inductive theories of regionalization and regimes, attempts to gain a fuller understanding of the roots and the level of the impact the ASEAN regime has had on the shaping of the larger APEC regime’s agenda, institutional framework and actions on certain substantive issues. The paper begins with a theoretical section in which the sociological theories of bargaining and collective action will be integrated with the theories most often used by economists and international relations scholars to analyze economic regionalization and its inter-state groupings such as ASEAN and APEC. This will then be used to address the interface between the ASEAN economic regime and the larger and fully encompassing APEC economic regime to evaluate the effectiveness of the ASEAN regime in achieving its stated and assumed interests during the formative stages of APEC regime (1989-1995). The paper addresses the strengths and weaknesses of the ASEAN grouping as a collective action group within the economic regime of APEC, the nature of the bargaining situation and structures within APEC and the influence of the ASEAN regime participation within the APEC regime on the ASEAN regime itself. From a definitional standpoint, this paper delineates conceptually between ASEAN and APEC as economic regions and economic regimes and, as political regimes and bureaucratic regimes to help clarify the nature and different usages of the terms ASEAN and APEC.
