The purpose of this article is to determine exports of Finland and Sweden to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and to compare actual exports to the potential, in order to see whether there remain untapped possibilities in the region. This was done both for the time (more exactly, for 1995) and for the next ten-year period, up till 2005. Introduction During the last few decades the member countries of the Association of the Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)' have displayed extremely high growth rates. This, in addition to the fact that a formal integration process has been initiated in the region (for a stock-taking, see ASEAN Secretariat 1997), has recently brought ASEAN into the focus of interest as a market and host of foreign direct investment. Despite the present economic downturn in Asia, ASEAN with its more than 450 million people remains an attractive market, especially in the longer run. As for the Nordic countries, increasing interest in ASEAN can clearly be noticed as well. While the economic relationships between ASEAN and the Nordic countries take many different forms, this article concentrates on the role of ASEAN as an market for Finland and Sweden. A more or less implicit idea in these countries seems to be that ASEAN represents a large market which has not yet been fully utilized and, especially, that its will grow rapidly in the future. The main purpose of this article is to determine exports for Finland and Sweden to the markets of ASEAN and to compare actual exports to the to see whether there remain untapped possibilities in the region. This type of question has not been addressed much in applied international economics, perhaps due to measurement problems. Export potential is, of course, an elusive concept which has to be defined operationally in order to be meaningful. In this article, export potential stands for exports predicted by some kind of model. (I used several alternatives in this work.) The article deals with the in both a static and a dynamic version. On the one hand, I make an attempt to evaluate whether there is untapped at the moment (i.e. in 1995); on the other hand, I try to assess how this is likely to develop over time, extending the time horizon to 2005. This article starts out with a descriptive view of the exports of Finland and Sweden to ASEAN. After this, I evaluate the present with the aid of the so-called trade intensity index, a rough method of assessing unused potential. Then a causal model of the gravity type is estimated, and the fitted values of this model are taken as values. Possible untapped exports can then be derived by comparing those values and actual values. Next, attention is focused on the long run orientation. To provide a benchmark, a log-linear trend of Finnish and Swedish exports to ASEAN was estimated and extrapolated to 2005. Finally I utilized the results of the gravity model, obtaining estimates of the exports in 2005 by inserting forecast values of the explanatory variables. Discussion of the results concludes the article. Of ASEAN's present member countries, Myanmar was excluded due to data problems while Laos was included despite the fact that the country became a member of the organization only in 1997. Both those cases, in fact, make little difference for the broad picture since Finnish and Swedish trade is quite insignificant with both Laos and Myanmar. Finnish and Swedish exports to ASEAN In the case of both Finland and Sweden, exports to ASEAN increased rapidly through the late 1980s and early 1990s but from a rather low starting level. In 1985 the share of ASEAN was only 0.7 per cent for Finland and 1.6 per cent for Sweden, increasing to 3.5 per cent for Finland and 3. …