ISDS Case Map
APEC
Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation
FTAs are supposedly meant to substitute for lack of progress at the WTO. In practice they are mostly preferential arrangements that run counter to APEC's principle of "open regionalism," which allows members to pursue liberalization at their own pace but on a nondiscriminatory basis.
The indefinite suspension of the Doha round of world trade talks creates big risks for the world economy. A new explosion of discriminatory bilateral and regional agreements is likely to substitute for global liberalisation, eroding the multilateral rules-based system of the World Trade Organisation.
The proliferation of regional and bilateral free trade agreements in the Asia-Pacific, coupled with the failure of global trade talks, is driving up transaction costs for business despite the decrease in tariffs.
The ongoing APEC senior official meeting (SOM II) will discuss Sunday existing and new policies for regional trading agreements and free trade agreements (RTA/FTA), reports from the APEC secretariat said.
A large set of strategic economic and security questions will challenge both US and Chinese leaders over the next decade. These relate directly to the growth of Asian regionalism, with attendant political institutions, decisions regarding new regional trade and investment agreements, as well as a potential new security architecture for at least East and South Asia.
Speech by Rt Honorable Helen Clark of the New Zealabd government
As world leaders gathered Friday for their annual talks on building a free trade zone that circles the Pacific, they were also spending time in sideline huddles forging one-on-one agreements.
About 2,000 farmers and farm activists and 3,000 union workers took to the streets of Pusan to denounce APEC, the World Trade Organisation and US President George W Bush, who was attending the leaders' meeting.
Criticised by business leaders and alarmed by the possible failure of next month's world trade talks in Hong Kong, Asia-Pacific governments are acknowledging for the first time the dangers of the tangled "spaghetti bowl" of bilateral trade deals they have spawned in the past few years.
Noting that a "spaghetti bowl of rules" would result from multiple bilateral free trade agreements among APEC members, Minister of Trade Phil Goff has called for coherence between FTAs in the region.
