Ippei Yamazawa
Professor Emeritus, Hitotsubashi University, Japan

APEC 2012 Meetings were successfully held in Vladivostok in September and we have got in recess for a while. The new IAPs by all 21 economies, together with Policy Support Unit’s Progress Reports and Dashboards have been published on the APEC’s website.

At 2010 APEC Yokohama, APEC Leaders conducted the mid-term review of their efforts for achieving the Bogor Goals and renewed their commitment for all 21 economies to continue their IAP process toward its final goals in 2020. We would like to call my fellow experts’ attention to this renewed IAP process and encourage you to closely monitor this process. We believe it is the role for us academics to monitor and advise our senior officials and their staffs to implement the IAPs effectively. Read more…

Dr Max Bessell
Faculty of the Professions at the University of Adelaide

One of the legacies of the Russian Federation’s hosting of APEC in 2012 will be the forging of new directions in higher education. Significant gains have been made in framing some clear strategic objectives which aim to develop and assist the dynamic world of higher education. These provide a solid base for Indonesia in the higher education arena as it takes over the host role in 2013.

Key issues confronting higher education in member economies include

• The nature of its contribution to development and capturing the opportunities it offers
• Doing so in the context of significant change in the international arena for higher education
• Dealing with the number of stakeholders who have an interest in education policy, such as domestic interests but also regional groupings such as APRU and the accrediting agencies, existing and emerging
• The more specific challenges to institutions such as finding and retaining academic staff, defining research agendas and providing clarity in the strategic direction of higher education providers in a global environment.

Some of these issues were laid out in the earlier PECC report on the “The Globalisation of Education: The Next Wave” which was jointly prepared with APRU. Read more…

Peter A. Petri and Michael G. Plummer

© Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics. All rights reserved.

SUMMARY

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, now in negotiation among nine Asia-Pacific countries, could yield annual global income gains of $295 billion (including $78 billion for the United States) and offers a pathway to free trade in the Asia-Pacific with potential gains of $1.9 trillion. The TPP’s expected template promises to be unusually productive because it offers opportunities for the leading sectors of emerging-market and advanced economies. An ambitious TPP template would generate greater benefits from integration than less demanding alternatives, but it will be harder to sell to China and other key regional partners as the TPP evolves toward wider agreements. The importance of Asia-Pacific integration argues for an early conclusion of the TPP negotiations, without jeopardizing the prospects for region-wide or even global agreements based on it in the future. Read more…

Masahiro Kawai
Dean and CEO, Asian Development Bank Institute

and

Ganeshan Wignaraja
Principal Economist, Office of Regional Economic Integration, Asian Development Bank

The inability to conclude the World Trade Organization (WTO) Doha Development Round has spawned a proliferation of bilateral and plurilateral free trade  agreements (FTAs) across the globe. While East Asia is a relative newcomer to FTAs, the region has seen a dramatic increase in the number of such agreements  in recent years. The explosion of FTAs in East Asia, led by the large economies of Northeast Asia—the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Japan, and the Republic of Korea (ROK)—is tied to the need to support sophisticated production networks through continued trade and investment liberalization, while also serving as a defensive response to the spread of FTAs elsewhere in the world.

A lively debate over the impact of FTAs on business in the region has resulted from their proliferation (see Baldwin 2006, Chia 2010). Data from East Asian  exporters on FTA utilization were lacking prior to an Asian Development Bank (ADB) firm-level multi-country survey conducted in 2007/08. The survey results  suggest that FTAs are indeed bolstering trade among firms, despite some concerns expressed over restrictive rules of origin (ROOs), particularly as economic recovery takes hold in the wake of declining trade volumes and nascent protectionism triggered by the recent global economic crisis. Governments can  facilitate the increased use of FTAs by actively disseminating information to firms on existing FTAs and adopting best practices in designing future FTAs, including ROOs.

East Asian economies are using FTAs to aggressively pursue their individual and collective trade strategies, leading to the expansion of advanced production networks across the region with hubs in Japan and the PRC. Rather than complicating efforts toward a Doha Round agreement, a region-wide FTA can contribute  to laying the foundation for such an agreement.

This brief is set out as follows. It begins by discussing East Asia’s emergence as a global factory and the spread of FTAs. It then examines varieties of national FTA strategies in Northeast and Southeast Asia. The brief goes on to analyze information on FTA use, impediments, and ROOs based on the ADB multi-country survey. Finally, it explores a possible way forward, highlighting short-term measures as well as a region-wide FTA for the medium term. Read more…

Julius Caesar Parrenas, PhD
Senior Advisory Fellow, Institute for International Monetary Affairs (IIMA)1
posted from: http://www.iima.or.jp/pdf/newsletter2010/NLNo_37_e.pdf

The recent G20 and APEC meetings in Seoul and Yokohama underscored the importance of structural reforms. While G20 leaders struggled over the way forward to achieve sustained global economic recovery, APEC leaders went ahead to launch work toward a Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP), possibly through the expansion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Embedded in the G20 and APEC leaders’ statements are references to a key issue that will influence the success of current efforts to sustain global recovery and advance free trade.

Annexed to the G20 statement is a document entitled the “Seoul Development Consensus for Shared Growth,” which laid out the framework for future work on “infrastructure, private investment and job creation, human resource development, trade, financial inclusion, growth with resilience, food security, domestic resource mobilization and knowledge-sharing.” The APEC statement referred to a strategy for achieving high-quality growth that is balanced, inclusive, sustainable, innovative and secure, described in detail in a separate document entitled “The APEC Leaders’ Growth Strategy.”

At the heart of this growth strategy is a renewed push for greater balance between domestic and external demand within economies, which is in turn key to addressing huge trade imbalances that have significantly contributed both to the current malaise afflicting the global economy and growing frictions over trade-related issues. This growth strategy hinges on structural reforms to address deep-seated problems that have emerged in the course of one of the longest periods of strong economic performance the world has ever seen. Read more…

APEC 2011: Can the US deliver?
Andrew Elek, ANU and member of AUSPECC
This article is cross-posted from the East Asia Forum website

The most important objective of international economic cooperation in 2011 is to conclude the Doha Round. The United States has the influence to do that if it is prepared to show political initiative and have realistic expectations of others.

The APEC group can also provide leadership within the G20 to tackle global problems. APEC’s Committee on Trade and Investment (CTI) can begin to set out a strategy on how the WTO might operate beyond the Doha Round. Bringing the WTO up to date with the 21st century world of international commerce is an essential dimension of cooperation to narrow development gaps. Read more…

Ippei Yamazawa
Professor Emeritus, Hitotsubashi University, Japan

2010 APEC Yokohama was completed three weeks ago with three major achievements, first the mid-term assessment of its Bogor target, second a concrete direction toward Free trade Area for the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP), and third APEC’s growth strategy. The first two give us a future prospect for APEC’s main activity of Trade Investment Liberalization and Facilitation (TILF), while the last packages its new initiatives undertaken for the past decade in order to combat with changing economic environment in the region. Discussion has so far focused on TPP as a possible route to FTAAP but others seem to be missed since the Yokohama meetings. This short essay aims to discuss both the first agenda and continued TILF of the second. Read more…

Yuen Pau Woo
President and CEO, Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada
From: http://www.asiapacific.ca/editorials/presidents-view

Prime Minister Harper and three of his senior cabinet ministers spent much of the last week at two major international gatherings in Asia. The Seoul G20 meeting on 11-12 November was followed by the annual APEC Leaders’ Summit in Yokohama. The close proximity of these two meetings and their overlapping mandates raise important questions about the rapidly changing structure of global governance and Canada’s place in it. In light of Ottawa’s recent failure to secure a seat on the United Nations Security Council, the issue of Canada’s place in regional and global groupings has come into sharper focus.

Read more…

Peter A. Petri
Brandeis University, Senior Fellow at the East-West Center, and member of the US Asia Pacific Council
This article appeared in Nihon Keizai Shimbun, November 8, 2010 (in Japanese)

The intense debate in the Democratic Party of Japan—on whether Japan should join the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade negotiations, an initiative spanning nine countries on both sides of the Pacific, including the United States—has far-reaching implications not just for Japan but for the region and the world.

Many of us in the United States would warmly welcome a positive Japanese decision. By joining the TPP effort, Japan would reenergize the vision of a truly integrated Asia-Pacific economy, as proposed by the leaders of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Bogor, Indonesia in 1994.

That beautiful, historic vision remains compelling: it’s hard to imagine a peaceful, prosperous world without a vibrant Asia-Pacific economy at its center. Yet, as leaders gather in Yokohama for the APEC summit this month, economic cooperation in the Pacific is more troubled than it has been for years.

Read more…

Christopher Findlay
University of Adelaide & Vice-Chair AUSPECC
This article is cross-posted from the East Asia Forum website

Japanese politicians are still debating whether Japan should join the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). TPP members are not allowed exclusions. Agriculture is the issue, specifically the domestic political constraints imposed by protection of that sector in Japan. At the same time, the business sector is pushing hard to join.

The TPP builds on the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement which Brunei Darussalam, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore set up in 2006. The TPP negotiating group now includes those four plus Australia, the US, Peru, Vietnam and Malaysia. The Japanese debate brought the TPP back to the headlines and highlighted the questions about the value of the preferential route to trade and domestic reform.

Read more…