Bilateral trade between Korea and ASEAN has decreased in a significant degree since the Asian financial crisis, which is mainly due to contraction of purchasing power in the both sides. Facing economic crisis, many ASEAN countries revoked already-announced trade liberalization scheme, which would be further reducing trade flows. It is also noticeable that Korea`s trade surplus against ASEAN has reduced, significantly in recent years. On the other hand, the WTO has opened a new round of multilateral trade negotiations in 2001, so-called Doha Development Agenda, in which reduction of trade barriers will be a major task. It would be urgent to well-prepare the negotiation to maximize our national interest. With this situation in mind, we intend to investigate trade barriers in general and high tariff items specifically in the major ASEAN countries based on the existing literature published by international organizations such as WTO, OECD and APEC as well as by individual countries such as the United States. Furthermore, we try to identify manufacturing goods that could be potentially improved in their export performance in the major ASEAN countries. In doing so, we examine bilateral trade data at HS code 4 digit level between Korea and the major ASEAN countries over the period of 1991-1996, and select Korea`s export items that had shown below average growth rate with relatively high tariff rates levied in the major ASEAN countries. Literature survey reveals that there exist many kinds of trade barriers in the major ASEAN countries such as significant tariff dispersion in the same HS codes, tariff escalation as well as high tariff rates in general. On the other hand, data analysis shows that some electric and electronic items(HS 85, 87), steel and chemical items(HS 72, 39), synthetic fabric items (HS 52, 54) recorded below average export performance with relatively high tariffs levied in the major ASEAN countries. What is surprising is that Korea had exported automobile to the major ASEAN countries very little to none, due to import-forbidden level of tariffs levied on the item. Acknowledging that we should cooperate with ASEAN in major trade issues such as developed countries` abuse of anti-dumping measures, we should at the same time be able to cope with trade barriers in the major ASEAN countries. Sufficient information on trade barriers in our major trading partners would be useful, not only for improving our export performance and thus maximizing our economic interest but as a bargaining chip against various situations. Competition with cooperation will be inevitable in this ever-changing world of international trade.