Suryo Bimantro, COGGS Intern
AFTER MORE THAN a decade as an observer and applicant, metal rich Timor-Leste is set to officially join the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) this year, with its membership scheduled to be formally ratified at the 47th ASEAN Summit in October 2025. Timor-Leste’s entrance into the Southeast Asian organization represents its decade-long struggle and progress as a “juvenile nation” that achieved national sovereignty and independence in the 2000s. Accepting Timor-Leste would also signify ASEAN’s emphasis on regional inclusivity and integration among nations within the region, despite significant economic and institutional disparities. This move would prioritize the development of Southeast Asian regionalism and unification above all else.
Such integration could potentially help improve Timor-Leste’s struggling economy. According to a 2025 report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Timor-Leste is ranked as one of the poorest nations in the Southeast Asian region, with a total GDP of approximately $2.1 billion USD and a GDP per capita of only $1,490 USD. ASEAN membership could also bring viable solutions to the critical issues the country is currently facing.
This article’s main purpose is to explain how Timor-Leste’s integration into ASEAN could offer opportunities for multilateral cooperation that would assist in national development and help address the challenges the nation continues to face. After all, multipolarity within ASEAN cannot be achieved if member countries focus solely on self-serving development.
ASEAN perceives its goal for economic cooperation as a priority for all its members without exclusion. This would provide Timor-Leste with the grand opportunity to learn from ASEAN states with longer experiences in maintaining and developing their economies. ASEAN has the capability to provide intensive training sessions for Timor-Leste’s government officials—sessions that provide expert insights and knowledge-sharing discussions within important subjects such as international trade, finance, tax management, resource management, and various other subjects that could help the Timor-Leste government to prepare its entry into the ASEAN economic framework, the next stage for its potential development within the Southeast Asian region itself.
Currently, this intensive training program has been done this year, specifically during the 11th–13th of March, 2025, in Timor-Leste’s capital city, Dili. This program involved several key actors, which include the Deputy Secretary-Director of the ASEAN Economic Community, the Asian Development Bank Country Director, the Malaysian Ambassador of Timor-Leste, the ASEAN Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation of Timor-Leste, and the rest are the ASEAN Secretariat staff, who are positioned as the trainers within the program. Every actor mentioned has the sole mission of preparing the economic and institutional readiness of Timor-Leste’s existing ministries and agencies as they finally integrate the nation into becoming a part of the ASEAN economic domain. If ASEAN’s intensive training program succeeds, it could bolster several solutions for some of Timor-Leste’s ongoing internal issues.
Beyond Oil & Gas
According to the Ministry of Trade and Industry of Timor-Leste, the country is suffering from an overreliance on gas and oil exports. Specifically, around 90% of Timor-Leste’s exports consist of gas and oil, with little room for other industries to participate in international trade. An overreliance on oil and gas may demonstrate a country’s wealth in natural resources, but it also reveals vulnerability and a lack of progress within a country’s economy. Fundamentally, globalization has made the world economically interconnected. If the prices of both oil and gas were to decrease significantly in the future due to the global transition toward clean and renewable energy, then Timor-Leste’s export revenues could suffer a downturn, causing a halt in its economic development.
This applies similarly if the prices of oil and gas were to increase, in the form of the infamous Dutch Disease—an economic phenomenon where an overreliance on a specific sector drives up a country’s currency value. This could alleviate the country’s poverty rate and stimulate internal development in the short term. However, in the long term, there’s a risk that it would allow cheap foreign imports to overtake the country’s industries, preventing the private sector from growing or competing fairly, while foreign businesses become powerful stakeholders and slowly monopolize the economy from within. The people of Timor-Leste would not only suffer significantly from higher poverty rates, but they would also face rising inflation, a lack of innovation and sustainable development, and a cycle of exploitation that is indirect in nature.
With ASEAN’s capacity-building program and intensive training sessions, member states could take advisory roles in managing Timor-Leste’s overreliance on oil and gas by helping the country discover new natural resources, develop industrial skills, implement human resource capacity-building methods, and pursue various other initiatives to strengthen Timor-Leste’s market diversification and improve its dwindling private sector.
To further increase the chances of success for these diversified markets, ASEAN member states could open trade barriers between Timor-Leste and themselves—or even call upon nations within the Asia-Pacific region, such as Japan and South Korea, to begin investing in Timor-Leste’s diversified markets while engaging in more bilateral or multilateral trade activities. What’s the point of diversifying an economy if you can’t even diversify your consumers?
Obviously, oil and gas industrial dependency won’t just disappear in the short term; this is why ASEAN economic cooperation must prove itself to be stable, efficient, and continuous in providing strong results with Timor-Leste’s ministries and agencies.
Tapping into Minerals
As mentioned previously, an overreliance on two natural resources wouldn’t aid Timor-Leste’s survivability in the long term before it eventually turns into a fallen state. This is why more markets, especially within the private sector, need to be formed to expand Timor-Leste’s international trade and human resource capacity—markets that will be formed from the rich and plentiful mineral resources within the lands of Timor-Leste itself.
According to a 2003 study by Francisco da Costa Monteiro, Director of Energy and Minerals within Timor-Leste, Timor-Leste’s natural resources are abundant, encompassing not only the vast oil and gas reserves within the land but also a variety of rich minerals discovered within Timor-Leste’s coastal environments. These minerals are divided into two categories—metallic and non-metallic—to simplify understanding.
| Metallic Minerals | Gold, copper, manganese, silver, and chromite. |
| Non-Metallic Minerals | Sand, gravel, limestone, clay, bentonites, kaolinites, marble, gypsum, and phosphate. |
The fact that Timor-Leste’s rich minerals are scattered throughout the country yet it could barely develop its economy proves the vast, untapped potential it currently has. Firstly, its metallic minerals could provide market ideas that could diversify the economy and expand trade flows with other countries.
| Gold | Copper | Manganese | Silver | Chromite |
| Gold could serve both as an export-oriented market and a domestic manufacturing market. A lot of developed countries see the value of gold in many luxury brands and jewelry industries.
ASEAN must remember to advise Timor-Leste’s development regarding their human resource capacity in manufacturing to ensure gold will not just solely be used for foreign extraction, but can also be used as a new job market for gold manufacturing domestically. |
According to the International Copper Study Group (ICSG), copper mining would reach an approximate number of 23.5 million tonnes within 2025, a 2.3% increase from 2024. This significant rise proves that copper mining could be a great asset for Timor-Leste’s developing economy. It would attract foreign investments, trade, and cooperation from both ASEAN and the entire global domain potentially.
Copper are used for manufacturing vehicles such as motorcycles and cars while also being a foundational material for phones and computers, objects that are central to the modern Southeast Asian contemporary culture nowadays.
Despite the harsh labor, this could prove to be a great economic diversification mechanism for Timor-Leste, though its sustainability over the future is questionable due to the rise of clean and renewable energy alternatives. That’s where the ASEAN economic cooperation comes in and discusses the issue with Timor-Leste. |
Another form of useful mineral that Timor-Leste’s officials could unearth to diversify it’s economy would be the manganese mineral, a mineral that could strengthen metallic materials such as steel, a very important mechanism to have within foreign aviation, shipment, and even military industries if properly maintained. | Just like these other materials, silver holds a wide range of usage in terms of manufacturing itself. Silver is used to manufacture phones, computers, laptops, televisions, circuit boards, batteries, and so much more. It’s possible to improve upon a country’s trade and innovation, which is truly remarkable. | Just like other materials here, chromite also serves as a hardening material for aerospace, aviation, transport, and other manufacturing industries. |
Through these discoveries alone, Timor-Leste proves itself to be a hotspot for many manufacturing-based industries. Through ASEAN economic cooperation, ASEAN could assist in Timor-Leste’s maintenance of these valuable minerals, creating jobs in the mining sector, logistics, manufacturing, sales and marketing, shipment and trade, and even finance. This could raise a new wave of skilled workers who could improve their livelihoods every time minerals are extracted or manufactured—a true capacity-building program born from the country’s rich natural resources.
ASEAN must provide sufficient advisory not only on proper management but also by connecting Timor-Leste with potential trade partners within and outside the region to ensure that trade flows and revenues increase rather than remain stagnant. Besides trade partners, advisory efforts should also focus on talent building through education and training programs for the youth of Timor-Leste in order to prepare for the introduction of new technology and manufacturing-based businesses across the country.
The Case of Corruption
The last and most crucial problem that ASEAN could assist Timor-Leste with would be the cycle of corruption, which could potentially destabilize all these capacity-building efforts. According to the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) in 2024, Timor-Leste ranks 70th out of a total of 180 countries around the world in terms of corruption, proving it to be less corrupt in comparison to other countries—though this result might be due to the country’s small population.
Through ASEAN economic integration, Timor-Leste could potentially lower that ranking even further through ASEAN’s collaborative platform, ASEAN-PAC (Parties Against Corruption), which was previously labeled as SEA-PAC (Southeast Asian Parties Against Corruption) in 2004.
The collaborative platform serves as a regional cooperation mechanism that provides extensive knowledge-sharing on anti-corruption methods and strategies; training programs to develop skill sets to counter corruption schemes; exchanges of expertise between countries through certified and experienced personnel and officials to help implement anti-corruption strategies within Southeast Asia; and conferences to gather ideas and strategies among ASEAN member states to further anti-corruption development across the region.
If Timor-Leste does not view its integration into ASEAN-PAC as a possibility, then all potential revenue growth from mineral resources, international trade, and many of its diversified markets could be at risk from the grasp of internal corruption—especially given that the country upholds democracy as its primary form of governance.
The bigger the economy, the merrier the people. The merrier the people, the more confident they are in raising children. The more confident the people become in having children, the more the population increases. As the population increases, centralized supervision becomes harder to manage within a full-blown democracy. Immense population growth begins to exert more and more plurality of morals and ethics as society grows, creating more hidden blind spots for those intelligent enough to exploit vast revenues for themselves among thousands or even millions of others around them.
[ Suryo Bimantro is an intern at COGGS and based in Surabaya, Indonesia. Opinions expressed those are his own. ]
References:
- Top Export-Import Countries. 2023. “Top Export-Import Countries.” Trade Information Portal. 2023. https://timor-lestetradeportal.com/id-id/site/display/808.
- Da Costa Monteiro, Francisco, Vicenti Da, and Costa Pinto. 2003. “Exploring Timor-Leste: -Minerals Potential.” https://www.pecc.org/resources/minerals-a-energy/1264-exploring-timor-leste-minerals-potential-paper/file
- Chen, Jackson. 2025. “Global Copper Surplus to More than Double in 2025 – ICSG.” MINING.COM. April 30, 2025. https://www.mining.com/?p=1177704.
Woolwine, C.S. 2019. Cyclic. https://cms.kpk.go.id/storage/tinymce/uploads/pdf/1733102405_E-Booklet-ASEAN_PAC.pdf
