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APEC as a Pacific OECD Revisited 47 By: ROS Size: 6" x 9" J/No: 03-10509 Fonts: Bembo 3 APEC AS A PACIFIC OECD REVISITED DAVID MACDUFF AND YUEN PAU WOO The idea of a trans-Pacific institution created along the lines of the Parisbased Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is almost as old as the OECD itself. The Pacific Trade and Development Conferences,which bring together economists from around the Asia-Pacific,discussed proposals for a trans-Pacific intergovernmental forum from the time of the first meeting in 1968.1 This idea took form in Peter Drysdale’s proposed “Organization for Pacific Trade and Development”,2 which drew on some elements of the OECD while underscoring that the European model was only partly applicable to the Pacific.3 In 1978, U.S. Senator John Glenn, as chairman of the Senate’s Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, commissioned a paper entitled “Evaluation of a Proposed Asian-Pacific Regional Economic Organization.” On the eve of APEC’s creation in 1989,Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke also proposed an institution which would“develop a capacity for analysis and consultation on economic and social issues, not as an academic exercise, but to help inform policy development by our respective governments.”The so-called Hawke Initiative made direct reference to the OECD as a model, albeit recognizing that the Parisbased organization operated within a very different context.4 02b APEC Ch 3 4/9/03, 1:10 PM 47 48 David MacDuff andYuen Pau Woo By: ROS Size: 6" x 9" J/No: 03-10509 Fonts: Bembo The founding members of APEC did not, however, subscribe to Hawke’s vision, and the trans-Pacific forum that was created instead adopted a distinctly anti-institutional character. By 1994, with the announcement of the Bogor targets, the focus in APEC was clearly on “free and open trade” (by 2010 for developed member economies, with an additional ten years for developing member economies to achieve the same).The means for achieving the Bogor targets were“open regionalism” and “concerted unilateral liberalization” — a process of voluntary tariff reduction through enlightened dialogue amongAPEC members,and the extension of these market-opening measures to non-members without a call for reciprocal actions.5 In 2002, at the half-way mark to the first Bogor milestone,APEC’s trade liberalization agenda was sidelined by the rise of bilateral free-trade agreements among APEC members, proposals for Asia-only regional integration, continued momentum towards a Free Trade Area of the Americas (which would include five APEC members), and the launch of a new multilateral trade round.Even though APEC has priorities other than trade and investment liberalization (and takes pains to emphasize these other priorities, notably trade facilitation and economic/technical co-operation),it would not be unfair to characterize the liberalization agenda as APEC’s raison d’être during most of its existence.This emphasis on liberalization was accompanied by a belief among manyAPEC officials and scholars that the enlightened voluntarism behind “concerted unilateral liberalization” and “open regionalism” precluded a need for much institutional infrastructure. It is no surprise, therefore,that for much of APEC’s history and especially the period from Bogor (1994) to the failure of the EarlyVoluntary Sectoral Liberalisation (EVSL) initiative in 1998, the idea of APEC as a Pacific OECD — indeed, the very mention of OECD in official APEC circles — was considered heresy.In this context,the recent interest of APEC officials in institutional reform and strengthening — for example, at the level of the APEC Secretariat6 — should be seen as part of a deeper unease about APEC’s main purposes and perhaps as an unspoken quest for a new raison d’être. Accordingly, while this chapter asks an old question about the relevance of a Pacific OECD, it poses that question in the new context of a twelve-year-old trans-Pacific organization that is itself reflecting upon its institutional arrangements. Specifically, the chapter will look at aspects of the OECD model that may be adopted byAPEC to reinvigorate its economic co-operation mandate.It will also suggest practical measures for advancing the idea of a Pacific OECD.As the chapter will point out, there are numerous aspects of the OECD’s work that are not relevant to APEC and perhaps not desirable as well.7 The use of the OECD as a benchmark should not be seen as institutional mimicry or as a case of 02b APEC Ch 3 4/9...

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