Waiting for stronger signal
The results of the APEC Ministerial Meeting may come as a major disappointment especially to businessmen who from the outset have focused their attention on the proposed timetable for free trade and investment liberalization in the region. After all, the expectations for something bolder and ambitious had been built up since August as soon as Indonesia, one of the least developed among APEC's 18 economies, expressed a strong commitment to an accelerated process of free trade and investment liberalization in the region.
Indeed, as APEC requires more clearly-defined guidelines for its future direction to maintain the forum's momentum, we did expect the trade and foreign ministers to come out with something more concrete than simply "welcoming the report of the Eminent Persons Group (EPG)" as they said in their joint statement issued at the end of their meeting on Saturday afternoon.
But our expectations are not entirely dashed as of yet.
Since the ministerial meeting had no relation with the second APEC Economic Leaders Meeting at Bogor on Tuesday, in the sense that the ministers did not prepare any agenda for that conference, the task of providing a more positive and stronger signal about APEC's future direction now falls on the leaders who will be meeting in Bogor. We are still optimistic because the EPG proposals for APEC's future directions in trade liberalization, investment and trade facilitation and technical cooperation will be among the main topics to be discussed by the leaders.
Nonetheless, the question now is: Did the outcome of the ministerial meeting really fall so short of expectations?
After perusing the 72-point joint statement and taking into account the great diversity of the interests of the APEC member economies, in view of the widely differing stages of their economic development, one is bound to have second thoughts about the said failure of that outcome. Judging from the delicate process of dialogs and the difficulty in wrapping up mutually beneficial agreements among so diverse a group of economies, the agreements and commitments concluded by the ministers actually are not so disappointing.
Among the impressive items are the agreements on some concrete programs or commitments, including the endorsement of the Non- Binding Investment Principles, the adoption of a declaration on human resource development, the advancement of programs in standards and conformance, as well as customs procedures, and in small and medium enterprise development. These commitments and programs, we think, are a step forward toward further improving the climate for investment and trade.
It is also encouraging to note that the ministers took another step forward in the institutionalization process of the APEC forum, as reflected in the decision to set up a new permanent committee (Economic Committee) and a task force to look into ways of strengthening the APEC Secretariat in Singapore. As APEC now has 10 working groups, three permanent committees and several other task forces or policy study groups, a stronger secretariat is needed to coordinate and support those activities.
Now that the process of vigorous dialogs has been stepped up across many sectors of economic cooperation through the working groups and task forces, and now that concrete working programs have been launched in several areas, it has become even more imperative for APEC to carefully set out clear guidelines for its future directions and to set out its goals as basic guidance to all those activities.
We hope these guidelines will be provided by the APEC leaders, who will be meeting in Bogor, to implement the Economic Vision Statement they issued in Seattle last year.