Private firms to monitor APEC action plans

Private firms to monitor APEC action plans

TOKYO (AFP): The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum has agreed to involve business circles in monitoring the execution of action plans for trade liberalization, press reports said Friday.

Under the agreement, the 18 APEC member economies will respect requests from businesses when they annually review their individual action plans, the Kyodo News quoted Japanese government sources as saying.

The APEC members are expected to formalize the accord at a meeting of their economic ministers, November 22-23 in the Philippines.

They are committed to launch the action plans, including trade liberalization steps in 15 areas such as tariffs, non-tariff restrictions and services.

At the annual APEC meeting a year ago in Osaka, Japan, they adopted an action agenda which urges regional trade and investment to be liberalized by 2010 for industrialized members and by 2020 for developing countries.

Japan has insisted on reflecting private-sector views on action plans as it believes that this would allow APEC members to better promote liberalized trade, the officials said.

At the Osaka meeting, Japan offered to implement Uruguay Round multilateral trade agreements ahead of schedule. The Tokyo government is now fine-tuning a new set of proposals centered around deregulation, Kyodo quoted the sources as saying.

APEC groups Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the United States, Canada, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mexico and Chile.

Jiji Press said that APEC members had agreed to work out criteria for new membership, which will be frozen until the end of this year. But it remains to be seen if the ban will actually be lifted because of conflicting political interests over new membership, Jiji said.

Vietnam, Peru and Russia are angling to join APEC.