APEC JAPAN 2010

Bridging the Region

More than twenty years have passed since APEC was founded in 1989. In this article, Hirokazu Okumura and Ippei Yamazawa comment on the history and future of APEC. When APEC was founded, Hirokazu Okumura (now a project professor at the University of Tokyo) was in charge of Southeast Asian affairs at the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, and he worked hard to help make APEC a reality through his dialog with Asian friends and intellectuals. Ippei Yamazawa, professor emeritus at Hitotsubashi University, served as an APEC Eminent Persons Group member (1993–1995) and has watched APEC continuously since its inception.

In the late 1980s, the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations, which aimed to promote the liberalization of global trade, had ground to a halt, and there were concerns that the global economy would fragment into trade blocs. The Japanese government recognized the need to combat the trend toward the formation of trade blocs, as well as the need to establish a new framework based on economic interdependence with other Asian countries.

According to Professor Okumura, “Countries in Southeast Asia, and ASEAN in particular, were experiencing rapid economic and trade growth at the time, which was partly due to increased investment from Japan. Behind the search for a new economic framework was awareness that the time to start broad-based cooperation among the countries of East Asia and North America had arrived.”

These were the circumstances when APEC started in 1989, as a ministerial level conference, focused on discussing economic cooperation and trade issues.

Commenting on APEC’s original agenda, Professor Okumura says, “the goals were to strengthen economic cooperation within the Asia-Pacific region by aiming for free trade, and to enhance the economic welfare of the entire region. The Japanese government emphasized soft cooperation, such as human resources development.” Needless to say, these are still important parts of APEC’s agenda today.


APEC made significant progress during its first Leaders’ Meeting in Seattle in 1993.

Professor Yamazawa recalls, “A lot of momentum came out of the Seattle Meeting. The following year saw the adoption of the Bogor Declaration, which aimed to achieve free and open trade and investment in the Asia-Pacific region, by 2010 for industrialized economies and 2020 for developing economies. In 1995, the Osaka Action Agenda was adopted as a roadmap for meeting the Bogor Goals through a combination of trade liberalization and facilitation on the one hand and economic and technical cooperation on the other. Then at the Manila Meeting in 1996, APEC finalized the system of Individual Action Plans (IAPs) and Collective Action Plans (CAPs) that is still used today, with an agreement to start implementation from 1997.”

APEC lost some momentum partly as a result of the 1997 Asian currency crisis, but at the start of the new century APEC established its next set of priorities as trade facilitation, capacity building and necessary structural reform in each economy. “The main pillars were standards and conformance, customs procedures, and business mobility. APEC continued its momentum through these kinds of pragmatic direction changes,” says Professor Yamazawa.

This year, 2010, is the deadline for industrialized economies to achieve the goals stipulated in the Bogor Declaration. Professor Yamazawa points out that APEC needs to move on to the next step. He assesses the progress made so far by saying, “APEC economies have made a good progress toward the Bogor Goals. They have expanded trade and investment, most remarkably in the world, in spite of still remaining impediments.”


Professor Yamazawa suggests that the next step should be, as well as promoting further liberalization of trade within the APEC region, to focus on the question of how to tackle the shared challenges that the international community faces today, such as global fiscal and financial problems, energy and environment issues, natural disasters and so on. At the Lima Meeting in 2008, the APEC Leaders issued a statement in which they expressed their commitment to address international issues at the regional level. Professor Yamazawa expresses his own hopes for the forum, saying “the world is now paying more attention to APEC as it engages with global issues collectively at the regional level—and the Pacific Rim is a big region.”

The next APEC Leaders’ Meeting will be held in Yokohama in November this year. As part of its preparations as the Chair of APEC this year, Japan has proposed that this year’s APEC priorities include “fostering the integration of the regional economies, establishing a new growth strategy for the entire region and strengthening ‘human security.’” Professor Yamazawa points out that Japan’s role is to lead discussions to develop a new vision for APEC in Yokohama, based on these priorities.