APEC's action plan
Pressures are mounting and expectations are rising for the fourth summit of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum leaders in Subic Bay near Manila later this week to produce a set of action plans for free, open trade and investment in the region. Simply reaffirming the blueprint and the action agenda from their last meeting in Osaka last November with new slogans and commitments would put at risk the seven-year-old economic forum's momentum and relevance in today's rapidly changing global marketplace.
True, it was much easier to agree on the grand design. The process of working out the technical details on concrete action plans usually follows a more delicate path, as each member then has to look into its own national interests and capabilities. However, if the fourth summit becomes mainly another stage of grand rhetoric, all the efforts put in over the last four years would have been in vain and the urgency of the next summit might diminish.
We nonetheless have more reasons to be optimistic about the coming summit. There are several compelling reasons, as well as supporting factors, which will prompt the APEC leaders meeting to push ahead with a concrete set of action plans. Foremost among them are the factors of the host itself, the reelection of U.S. President Bill Clinton, the stronger mandate to be brought by Japan's Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, compared to that of Tomiichi Murayama last November, and the first ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization in Singapore in the second week of next month.
The Philippines, which until the early 1990s had often been referred to as the "economic laggard" in Southeast Asia, has been enjoying a strong economic recovery since last year. The rapid transformation of the economy has given President Fidel Ramos a new sense of confidence regarding free, open trade and investment. This could already be seen from Ramos' strong determination and leadership in the preparations to make the summit a highly productive meeting.
President Clinton, who was forced by budget problems to be absent from the third summit in Osaka, and Hashimoto, more confident after the reestablishment of his Liberal Democratic Party's rule, would most likely set good examples in determining the pace of action plans. Since APEC had been responsible for pushing the Uruguay Round negotiations to the birth of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in January 1995, it is again expected to play a role model and pace setter for the huge multilateral trade conference in Singapore. But the summit in Subic Bay should provide the credibility for APEC to play such a role model.
The presence of around 500 chief executive officers from the 18 members who will be holding a parallel two-day corporate summit in Manila starting tomorrow will exert another indirect pressure on the APEC leaders to zero in on concrete action plans. After all, it is the businesspeople who will be the central players in whatever programs of action are ironed out.
It is encouraging to learn from the excerpts leaked out from the draft documents to be finalized by APEC that each member has submitted individual action plans on tariff cuts. However impressive the individual commitment might be, that is only a small part of the big challenge to achieve the APEC goal. Free, open trade and investment is not only a matter of tariff cuts. Even without APEC, each member has committed itself to cutting tariffs under the WTO framework. The leaders should go much further than that to make APEC a highly valued economic forum.
More challenging and sometimes more complex, yet more important, is the process of facilitating trade and investment. This calls for the harmonization and streamlining of customs services and procedures, standards, rules of origin, business mobility, procurements, non-tariff measures and dispute mediation. In fact, the measures outside the tariff cuts are even more important for APEC to enhance economic interlinks through trade and investment.