Private sector asked to help draft action plan for APEC
JAKARTA (JP): The government has urged the private sector to play a bigger role in formulating Indonesia's individual action plan which will be proposed to APEC leaders in their fourth summit in November and identify opportunities in other members' markets.
"We should do our best in formulating our individual action plan so that it will be applicable," said the foreign ministry's Director General of Foreign Economic Relations Soemadi D.M. Brotodiningrat yesterday.
At a gathering organized by the Forum for Inter-Associations of Indonesian Companies, Soemadi noted that intensive consultations between the government and the private sector, including small and medium-scale businesses, is a must to discover the strengths and weaknesses of the Indonesian economy.
Indonesia and the other 17 members of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) will present their individual action plans during the leaders' meeting in the Philippines.
APEC, which had a combined gross domestic product (GDP) of US$13.4 trillion in 1993 or 56 percent of the world's GDP, comprises 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.
The individual action plans will be used as bases for the implementation of APEC's Osaka Action Plan, which was agreed upon by the group's members last November in Osaka, Japan.
The Osaka Action Plan consists of three main components, namely the liberalization of trade and investment, facilitation of trade and investment, and technical and economic cooperation.
The Osaka plan was also a follow-up to the Bogor Declaration requiring APEC's developed member economies to liberalize trade and investment by 2010 and its developing members by 2020.
Approach
According to Soemadi, the liberalization and facilitation of trade and investment are based on a concerted unilateral approach, which was approved during the Osaka meeting. The unilateral approach will be later combined with APEC's collective actions.
Under the concerted unilateral approach, members are allowed to formulate their own individual action plan with the stipulation that it complies with nine general principles -- including flexibility, comparability, nondiscrimination, simultaneous start, continuous process and different timetables.
Soemadi noted that in its individual action plan, Indonesia will propose goods to be subjected to immediate and gradual liberalization.
"Of course, we will consider in what sectors we're strong and in what sectors we're still weak," he said, adding that "we need the participation of the private sector, including small businesses, to identify our strengths and weaknesses".
Soemadi said that businesspeople should also monitor the individual action plans of the other APEC members to find potential business opportunities for Indonesia.
"There could be opportunities for us to do business in the markets of other members," he said. (13)