Focus on Pacific Trade Unity

The heads of state of the 21-nation Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, including President Clinton, meet Sunday and Monday in Auckland, New Zealand, to hammer out a common agenda for the next round of global trade liberalization talks. If they succeed, and they should, APEC will have served its main purpose as a forum for coordination of the region’s economic issues.

To those who expected APEC to turn into a free trade bloc similar to North America’s, it has been a singular disappointment. In the 10 years of its existence, the forum agreed on little more than a list of 15 sectors in which trade liberalization should be speeded up and then handed the negotiations over to the World Trade Organization.

Criticism of APEC as a do-nothing talk shop is partly justified. Even some of its own members, disappointed with its failure last year to address Asia’s economic crisis and impatient with the slow pace of market openings, have called for dismantling APEC. But the organization was never meant to be a regional trading bloc. Rather, its members on both sides of the Pacific agreed to open up their economies through what they called “concerted unilateral trade liberalization.” That means they would dismantle their national barriers to trade and open markets to everybody. That countries as rich as the United States and Japan and as poor as Papua New Guinea and Vietnam agreed to march in the same direction is significant in itself. Many other regions, especially in the developing world, have yet to accept the expansion of economic development beyond national borders as beneficial or desirable.

The Auckland summit may well be remembered most as the place where the United States and China tried to patch up their differences at a meeting between Presidents Jiang Zemin and Clinton. If APEC countries agree to speak with one voice at the upcoming WTO trade talks, the summit will be a success.