APEC: Sharpening The Focus, Sustaining the Momentum

The Pacific Basin Economic Council (PBEC) throughout its thirty year history has consistently promoted the expansion of trade and investment through open markets. Within this context, PBEC is fully supportive of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum’s commitment to liberalize trade and investment in the Asia-Pacific region and calls upon APEC to move in 1997 from an agenda-setting body to an implementation body with specific, concrete, measurable outcomes.

The APEC process has evolved with a commendable sense of purpose in its eight years. In expanding its original membership from 12 to 18, APEC now embraces the key economies of the Asia Pacific region. The APEC Leaders’ meetings, launched at Blake Island near Seattle in 1993, have become a widely anticipated annual event on the international calendar. They continue to serve as a powerful venue for discussion of the challenges facing some of the world’s most dynamic, and yet most diverse, economies.

PBEC believes that APEC economies would benefit most by speedy and effective implementation of their trade and investment liberalization and facilitation commitments. Over the past four years, various groups – the Eminent Persons Group, the Pacific Business Forum, the APEC Business Advisory Council, the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council, and PBEC itself – have requested that APEC take action on trade and investment goals important to business. A compendium of these recommendations is appended to this report.

PBEC recognizes that APEC has begun the long, detailed and, at times, tedious task of addressing many of these recommendations, and believes priority should be given to:

• rapid elimination of administrative barriers to trade and investment that unduly hinder trade flows in the region;

• strengthening and implementing the APEC Non-Binding Investment Principles, as well as meeting commitments under the WTO Trade Related Investment Measures Agreement, in order to increase the flow of investment capital in the region; and

• establishment of effective regimes for the protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights in order to facilitate the development and transfer of technology.

PBEC applauds APEC’s vision and the energy it has expended to create among its diverse members a true sense of community. PBEC, the voice of business in the Pacific, stands ready to work with APEC and its individual member economies, both directly and with the APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC), to ensure that the APEC process is focused on achieving results of tangible benefit to business and all peoples of the region.

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