APEC free trade marks U.S. trade policy milestone+
APEC free trade marks U.S. trade policy milestone+
By Antonio Kamiya
WASHINGTON (Kyodo): Architects of U.S. trade policy have reasons to cheer when leaders of the 18 Asia-Pacific nations and territories meet in Bogor, Indonesia, on Nov. 15 for the second Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum summit.
There, by most accounts, the APEC leaders are likely to commit themselves to removing all major trade barriers in the region by a certain target date.
Such a political commitment, however vague and tentative it might be, marks yet another milestone in the U.S. administration's carefully orchestrated design to refashion the global trading system to match its own image.
That strategy, developed in the 1980s but hammered home with great vigor under the Clinton administration, takes on a multilayered approach that has engaged Washington on several fronts -- global, regional and bilateral.
Last April, after eight years of negotiations, the United States clinched a global trade pact, which for the first time put two major trade sectors where the U.S. is strongest -- services industry and farming -- into trade rules under the GATT system.
The U.S. believes a liberalized, global trade regime will inject as much as 1 trillion dollars into the U.S. economy over a 10-year period.
Regionally, the U.S. has consolidated its position as the favored trader in the Western hemisphere through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Mexico and Canada, a pact the U.S. clearly wants extended to other Latin American countries south of Mexico.
That pan-American spirit is expected to take another boost when President Bill Clinton returns from Asia and joins leaders of the American continent for a Florida summit of the Americas set for early December.
Washington has also pursued trade goals on a nation-to-nation basis.
Taking advantage of the U.S. position as the richest, biggest single market in the world, the Clinton administration has strong-armed Japan, China and other countries deemed by the U.S. as "unfair" traders into accepting U.S. ways of doing things.
And turning APEC into a vehicle for building "a community of Asia-Pacific economies" -- the U.S.-inspired goal APEC leaders accepted in Seattle a year ago -- reflects the system-building process Clinton's economic team has pursued in furthering global U.S. trade interests.
"We view APEC as the new regional economic architecture for the Asia-Pacific region and for our relationships with Asia," says Assistant U.S. Trade Representative Nancy Adams in a message the Clinton administration has been trumpeting in the run-up to the Bogor summit.
U.S. economic stakes in Asia-Pacific are high, judging by the potential of the East Asian markets, home to the fast-growing economies in the world.
Last year, U.S. goods sold to Pacific Rim countries outside North America totaled US$ 130 billion, which was 20 percent greater than U.S. exports to Europe.
More importantly, the fast Asian economies have been sucking in U.S.-made goods at a pace unparalleled elsewhere.
According to Commerce Department figures, U.S. merchandise exports to Pacific Rim countries grew 12.7 percent this year -- almost twice the pace of growth for U.S. exports to the rest of the world.
And U.S. economists believe American businesses can do much better in Asia, once trade barriers fall.
According to some U.S. economists, the trade liberalization process -- the main agenda at the APEC summit in Bogor -- is primarily a job cut for Asian member countries.
"Given the fact that all of the countries in the region, outside North America in particular, have lots of trade barriers... very little would actually be required from the United States," said U.S. economist Fred Bergsten, chairman of a panel of trade experts from APEC countries that has proposed achieving free trade in the region between 2010 and 2020.
"So, trade liberalization, or particularly moving to totally free trade in the region, means enormous competitive gain to the United States," Bergsten recently told a trade forum in Washington.
Bergsten, who heads an influential economic think tank in Washington, argues that the huge size of the U.S. market is bound to draw Asian countries to the U.S.
"Almost all of the Asian countries, despite diversification of their trade pattern, still depend on the U.S. market for something like a quarter to a third of all of their export earnings. Therefore, continued access to the U.S. is of critical importance to them," he said.