China, S. Korea may shine in APEC meeting
JAKARTA (JP): China and South Korea are expected to become champions in bolstering the trade liberalization process at the forthcoming meeting of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Manila next month, says an economist.
Mari Pangestu, the chief economist of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said yesterday that given the infancy of APEC, the organization still needs a number of champions to expedite liberalization and to prove its credibility to the outside world.
"In the next meeting, beside host Philippines, South Korea and China are also expected to become champions or heroes," she said in a seminar on trade and investment organized by the Asian Region International Association of Cooperating Organization.
Besides the host, other economies contributed to trade liberalization in previous meetings.
In the Osaka meeting last year, Japan as host country adopted comprehensive principles such as not allowing the permanent exclusion of agriculture from the liberalization schedules.
In the meeting, other economies were asked to provide initial action plans and several of these were quite bold such as those provided by Indonesia and China, Mari said.
She, however, doubted if the Manila meeting would result in a significant breakthrough, given the fact that most APEC members were still divided over the need to transform the relaxed organization into a negotiating and formal trade grouping.
"One should not expect too much from Manila this year. Otherwise, disappointment is in store," Mari said, adding that an important contribution from Manila this year would be to actually set out in a concrete fashion the template for enacting liberalization and facilitation.
She said it would be possible to see parts of it embellished and with clear time frames for some economies, but there would still be gaps.
The slow progress in the liberalization process will be caused by slow decision-making in the organization, she said.
In APEC, the liberalization process is not only based on a voluntary basis but also on unilateral action in accordance with plans, and will also depend on the priorities of respective member countries. It means that the agreement within APEC should be reached through a consultative process and should be based on consensus.
Mari said that such a decision-making process was adopted from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) but it had been widely criticized because with such a way, progress can only be as fast as its slowest member.
"One of the main issues faced by OPEC at present is how to best formulate the action plans and fulfill the objectives and goals it has set out," she told the seminar, which also featured several other speakers, including Ippei Yamazawa, a senior economists at Japan's Hitotsubashi University, Edgardo Campos, a World Bank economist, and Anwar Nasution, an economist at University of Indonesia.
Yamazawa said in the seminar that the liberalization process in APEC should be consistent with multilateral liberalization principles adopted by the World Trade Organization.
He said that APEC members should extend their liberalization to members and nonmembers on a Most Favored Nations basis.
Yamazawa suggested that APEC should talk with the European Union and encourage members to join in a similar accelerated implementation of the Uruguay Round Table outcome.
At a later stage, they should invite the EU to jointly initiate a new round of global liberalization with the WTO, he said.
APEC is comprised of Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and the United States. (hen)