APEC to promote market opening at Singapore summit

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: Shamim Adam

The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation will focus on “longer-term” issues such as promoting trade and market opening as the group’s members emerge from recession, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said.

The 21-member grouping has a long-term vision of creating a free trade area in the Asia Pacific and will use existing trade accords as a springboard to achieving this goal, Lee said today. The Southeast Asian island will host the summit of APEC leaders November 14 and November 15.

“We will be discussing how to advance APEC’s core mission which is to advance free trade and open markets in the Asia-Pacific,” Lee, 57, told reporters in Singapore. “The idea is to consolidate a network of free trade agreements which have sprung up and to reduce the administrative complexities and overheads of businesses.”

APEC members, whose economies account for more than half of global gross domestic product, in 1994 signed the “Bogor Declaration” pledging to create free and open trade in the group’s developed economies by 2010 and in its emerging economies by 2020.

“Countries have made some progress towards the Bogor goals but we haven’t quite yet achieved everything,” Lee said. “Within the last couple of years, because of the economic circumstances, some backward steps have been taken as conditions have been hard and people have had to make concessions because of political pressures.”

APEC will also discuss efforts to reach a new agreement to cut tariffs and subsidies in the World Trade Organisation as part of the so-called Doha Round, Lee said. Talks aimed at reaching a global accord have been stalled for eight years as international leaders warn rising protectionism may deepen the world’s economic slump.

Global outlook

The global economic outlook remains uncertain and the consensus among policy makers, including leaders at the Group of 20 nations, is that stimulus measures can’t be withdrawn suddenly, Lee said. Still, the global economy is out of its “trough,” he said.

APEC said in July growing protectionist sentiment was threatening the world’s recovery from its deepest slump since the Great Depression. Completion of the WTO trade talks is necessary to prevent protectionism from re-emerging, Lee said.