Introduction

First I want to thank Earnest for the invitation to meet members of US-ASEAN Business Council. I also recognized the presence of HE Pengiran Dato Anak Puteh, Brunei Ambassador to the US. I acknowledge members’ strong interest on Asia Pacific especially on ASEAN and am honoured and privileged today to continue talking about APEC. I believe my colleague from Brunei, Mr Hamid Jaafar had an opportunity last month to discuss with some of you on this year’s APEC theme and priorities under the stewardship of Brunei.

I like to go back a little back to what many people believed to be the turning point for APEC. Back in Seattle in 1993, APEC leaders first met and announced their visions for a community. It was a vision to build an Asia-Pacific community through economic growth and equitable development through trade and economic cooperation. A community to be based on the spirit of openness and partnership, on co-operative efforts to solve the challenges of change, on free exchange of goods, services and investment, on higher living and educational standards and on sustainable growth for all the economies in the region.

The Direction

Since those early days, APEC has grown in substance and purpose - from mere exchanges on economic issues of common concern to commitment to the multilateral trading system and its further development through consensus building. All of this would be done to reach the goal of promoting economic growth through intensifying regional interdependence.

The Leaders’ Meeting in Bogor, Indonesia in 1994 was APEC’s second key milestone. It was at this meeting that APEC’s Leaders declared that their goals were to strengthen the open multilateral trading system, enhance trade and liberalization in the Asia-Pacific and intensify development cooperation in the region. But the real news was the "Bogor Declaration," in which the Leaders agreed to establish free and open trade and investment in the APEC region by 2010 for developed economies and by 2020 for developing economies.

The third and final milestone took two Leaders’ meetings to complete. In Osaka (1995) and a year later in Manila (1996), the Leaders added flesh to Bogor’s bare bones. They agreed on a mix of individual and collective steps in liberalization, facilitation, and economic-technical cooperation designed to meet the 2010/2020 goals. This "Osaka Action Agenda" and "Manila Action Plan" helped crystallise APEC’s work agenda so APEC could map out a path to its goal—free and open trade and investment in the Asia Pacific region by 2020.

The agreements reached in Bogor, Osaka, and Manila still serve as the beacons for APEC’s work. Those three milestones pushed APEC process far beyond the original goals of the founders of APEC, thus fostering a process of economic cooperation with far-reaching potential.

In Manila, Leaders also laid down yet another important decision. It was then that the Leaders announced that, "APEC means business." The importance of business to APEC was well recognized when that year APEC leaders agreed to appoint a group of prominent business representatives, the APEC Advisory Business Council or ABAC, from APEC economies to advise them and Ministers and "to provide insights and counsel for our APEC activities." Since then, Leaders have received annual year-end reports that are always cutting-edge, thought provoking, and very challenging for APEC officials. As much as anything, it is APEC’s very close and strong ties to business, at all levels, which sets it apart from other international and regional organizations.

Turning to this year ABAC’s focus, the group will emphasize the following 5 areas:

Assessing the electronic Individual Action Plan from the business viewpoint;
Strengthening domestic financial systems in the APEC region;
Finding and applying creative ideas in IT and biotechnology;
Achieving concrete deliverables in business facilitation and increasing the participation of economies in the APEC Business Travel Card; and
Stressing outreach as a key goal for APEC and ABAC.
Outcomes of Seattle WTO Ministerial Meeting

Two important factors affecting APEC process today are the outcomes of the Seattle WTO Ministerial Meeting and the rapid development of information technology. While the outcomes of the Seattle WTO Ministerial Meeting did little to help what APEC has been trying to achieve, and while many factors have been attributed to the failure to launch a new round, one dimension that stands out is that WTO and APEC must devote much more effort in communicating the impact of globalisation as well as the positive effects of liberalisation.

There remains no doubt that APEC remains committed to trade and investment liberalisation and will continue to support and contribute to the Multilateral Trading System. Indeed, APEC Trade Ministers Meeting in June (Darwin, Australia) and The Leaders Meeting in November (Brunei) will provide opportunities to build political support for the WTO.

We all know that trade and investment liberalisation is good. We all know that those economies practising open trading systems fare better than the others that do not. Indeed, a recent study of 80 economies by two World Bank economists demonstrates conclusively that economic growth benefits the poor in the same proportion as it benefits the population as a whole. In effect, then, the economic growth brought by through globalization raises all boats.

However, the lessons of Seattle suggest that globalisation, or misperceptions about it, can divide people. It can be seen as marginalizing countries and people. While liberalisation is not necessarily bad, many of those on the streets of Seattle thought otherwise.

APEC should, first and foremost, benefit its people. This brings me to this year’s agenda.

The main thrust of this year’s APEC theme - delivering to the community – and the priorities, seek to build on the robust outcomes of last year’s Leaders/Ministers Meeting. It is also designed to ensure that APEC is taking into account present challenges posted by the outcomes of Seattle WTO Ministerial Meeting and the opportunities associated with the tremendous development of information and communication technology.

Strengthening Markets and Facilitating Business

There is no doubt that Asian economic recovery is real and faster than earlier anticipated. However, there is no room for complacency. Under the umbrella of strengthening markets and reforms, APEC will continue to focus on works aimed at providing greater transparency and predictability in corporate and public sector governance, enhancing the role of competition to improve efficiency and broaden participation by enterprises, improving the quality of regulation together with the capacity of regulators to design and implementing policies for sustainable growth.

In the pipeline are several new initiatives that would strengthen markets among these are Legal Infrastructure Symposium, APEC 2000 Small and Medium Enterprises and new business Support Workshop both proposed by Japan. The United states’ proposal on Building the Foundation on the New Economy is attempted to draw steps – building flexible, innovative structures to address market fundamentals, promoting the use of electronic tools by all business and implementing policies which would facilitate a web of connections to electronic commerce.

Other APEC activities under this broad topic that benefit business include non-binding principles on government procurement, deregulation, dispute-mediation, mobility of business people and services, notably the regional directory of professional services and, in addition, work on mutual recognition of skills qualifications in engineering fields. APEC members have agreed to fully implement the Trade-Related Intellectual Property (TRIPs) Agreements no later than this year and have facilitated technical cooperation to achieve the goal.

On the other hand, APEC business sector reminds us regularly that APEC trade facilitation exercises are as important as trade and investment liberalization. Trade facilitation contributes substantially to efforts to strengthen markets and enhance market access. APEC’s achievements in Standards and Conformance include encouraging alignment of members’ standards with the international standards in a range of products, achieving mutual recognition arrangements among APEC members, promoting cooperation to develop the technical infrastructure needed for those mutual recognition arrangements, and ensuring transparency of standards and conformance assessments. Work on Simplification and Harmonization of Custom Procedures should be complete by 2002.

These actions have already resulted in significant cost savings for exporters and importers. The committee entrusted with implementing these initiatives is also vigorously working on Paperless Trading, which would be implemented by 2005. It should come as no surprise that business strongly welcomes these efforts and the benefits and cost savings they will bring to doing business in the APEC region.

A set of APEC Principles on Trade Facilitation to assist policy makers in formulating and implementing trade and investment measures that are pro-business, and programs to implement those Principles will also be developed this year.

Making APEC Matters More

To ensure that APEC has substance and relevance in the difficulties faced by the multilateral trading system; APEC is enhancing its outreach activities to its own community. As a first step to better communicate APEC’s work, the Secretariat is redesigning its website to make it more user friendly and intuitive.

There will be a new and improved window in the Secretariat’s web site to facilitate information for business, a project initiated by Australia who is also working on publication on APEC’s past achievements that are relevant for business and wider community.

Brunei, who chairs this year’s APEC meetings, is very keen build upon the robust outcomes of Auckland Meeting by seeing more implementation this year. APEC will undertake to make its Individual Action Plan more user-friendly and functional for business planners. We hope to finalise this project by October this year and the result will be Action Plans that are much easier to use.

Small and Medium Enterprise, as I mentioned a moment ago, is a key APEC priority. A SME Ministerial Meeting will be held this June in Brunei, in conjunction with a SME Business Forum, an E-Commerce Workshop, an E-Trade Fair and a Women Leaders Network.

New Opportunities

One of the sub-themes this year - creating new opportunities - takes into account the vital importance for knowledge-based economies and the potential, for business, of information and telecommunication technology. The E-Trade Fair and the E-Commerce workshop held with the SME Ministerial will help SMEs grasp how to harness the huge potential of these sectors and the revolutionary impact they have on doing business, affecting everything from production and sales to servicing and advertizing. In a real sense, it is the Internet and the new technologies, which can help SMEs, reach a much broader market, leapfrogging the confines of local consumer markets.

APEC Means More to Its Business and Community

To provide greater coherence and relevance to the community, Brunei would like to ensure that APEC matters more to the community. I believe strongly that APEC already matters to the community—our challenge is to publicize why that is so in a way, which those living in our economies can best, understand. As I mentioned before, a Women Business Network Meeting and Youth Activities are being planned this year. How well we get out this message will influence how much progress we can make in APEC over the coming years. Getting the majority of people supporting our efforts will make achieving our goals so much easier.

APEC is also concerned with a very new but nonetheless real phenomenon – the digital divide. As the world economy moves further toward this post-modern age of advanced technology, there is a fear that some will be left behind. It would be sadly ironic if a creation designed to bring the world closer together, the Internet, instead ends up leaving some even further behind. Technologies like cell phone networks allow developing economies to skip entire levels of infrastructure development—cell phone systems can be much cheaper to build in rural areas than building hard line telephone networks. Likewise, the Internet brings with it a similar potential. The challenge for APEC in its economic and technical cooperation and capacity building work will be to realize this potential in such a way that everyone benefits.

Officials, like generals, are sometimes accused of "fighting the last war." Indeed, in the economic environment of high technology where a couple of months is considered "the long run," we officials may be fated to always playing catch-up. It is in these times of rapid change that we really earn our salaries but, if we have enough vision, we will succeed. And if our vision wavers, I have no doubts that our young academia and entrepreneurs present here will help remind us to recover our focus. It is you who best know what makes our economies strong.

Thank you