Ebbs and Flows in the Past Twenty Years

APEC will be celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year 2009. In 1989, it started as a series of meetings of Foreign and Trade Ministers from twelve member economies on economic cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region. Through the years, APEC has witnessed ebbs and flows in its momentum of cooperation.

Trade and investment liberalization and facilitation (TILF) has become one of APEC's major tasks since the first Economic Leaders Meeting in Seattle in 1993, where leaders jointly declared that they would “achieve free and open trade in Asia and Pacific”. The Second Leaders meeting in Bogor, Indonesia, delivered the ambitious Bogor Declaration on “achieving liberalization by developed economies in 2010 and by the rest of economies in 2020”. In 1995, the Osaka APEC adopted the Osaka Action Agenda (OAA) which provided concrete measures that can be taken to achieve the Bogor Goals.

The Committee for Trade and Investment (CTI) provided a common format in 1996 for Individual Action Plans (IAPs), in which individual member governments announced their own programmes to be implemented according to the OAA. CTI also produced a Collective Action Plan (CAP) regarding measures to be implemented collectively such as harmonized legislatures and systems. Thus IAPs included individual members’ participation in CAP. The Manila APEC in November 1996 approved IAPs submitted by all member governments (Manila Action Plan for APEC, MAPA) and their implementation started in 1997.

The annual APEC gathering of Prime Ministers and Presidents of major economies with bold declarations often attracted the media's attention. Expectations for APEC became more heightened when participating members increased to 21 in 1998, covering all major economies surrounding the Pacific Ocean.

However, APEC encountered a big setback during the Asian financial crisis when several ASEAN members and the Republic of Korea (ROK) were severely hit, with their currencies depreciating substantially, and some suffering from negative growth rates. The EVSL (Early Voluntary Sector Liberalization), a breakthrough attempt of liberalization in the “easy sectors” also failed.