On Sunday, the 21 largest economies of Asia Pacific ended their biggest event of the year.
n Sunday, the 21 largest economies of Asia Pacific ended their biggest event of the year. The good graces and big smiles of Papua New Guineans were inspirational for the Indonesian business delegation, as we had a chance to have a direct and candid dialogue with various economic leaders here.
In addition to the leaders’ failure to agree on a joint statement, their big agenda also did not envision where Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) would go when the Bogor Goals expire in 2020. As the birthplace of the Bogor Goals in 1994, Indonesia must once again make its mark.
The Bogor Goals plan to establish free and open trade in Asia-Pacific by further reducing barriers and by promoting the free flow of goods, services and capital among APEC economies. So much has been achieved, yet so much could have been done better. Based on the latest available data of the APEC Policy Support Unit, APEC’s total trade in goods from 1994 to 2014 increased at a yearly average rate of 7.8 percent, reaching US$18.4 trillion in 2014 with Intra-APEC trade increasing fourfold.
However, APEC trade has slowed since 2008 and its growth rates have been falling behind gross domestic product (GDP0 growth rates since 2012. And we are now expecting lower trade growth from the regional impact of two of its biggest member economies, the United States and China. We thus see a potential for APEC to grow beyond a platform for dialogue and sharing best practices into a framework for a wider and more integrated cooperation.
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