CEBU, May 18 (PIA) -- Discussions of possible pathways to the Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP) were one of the highlights of the recently concluded APEC Study Centers Consortium Conference 2015 held on May 12-13 in Boracay Island.
In promoting and advancing regional economic integration, APEC
seeks to create a community that is more economically integrated, where goods,
services, and people move seamlessly across borders and enable a dynamic
business environment.
The FTAAP has a big potential to boost economic growth in the
Asia-Pacific region. Once in place, it could dwarf all other economic
arrangements ever made given its size and scope.
The 21 APEC member-economies control half of the world trade and
account for 60 percent of the global economy. They are home to nearly 3 billion
consumers in some of the world’s most vibrant economies.
The FTAAP is at the top of the APEC agenda. In their 2010
declaration, APEC Leaders announced that they have agreed to explore possible
pathways to achieve the FTAAP.
To this end, they have “instructed APEC to take concrete steps
toward the realization of the FTAAP, which is a major instrument to further
APEC’s Regional Economic Integration (REI) agenda.”
The idea is that the FTAAP should be realized as a comprehensive
free trade agreement that could be built through regional undertakings, such as
ASEAN+3, ASEAN+6, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
To date, there are three proposed pathways to the FTAAP: the
United States-led TPP, the ASEAN-based Regional Comprehensive Economic
Partnership (RCEP) process, and the Pacific Alliance.
The assistant and associate professors from Asia-Pacific Studies
Centre, Universidad EAFIT in Colombia, Camilo Perez-Restrepo and Adriana
Roldan-Perez respectively underscored that both TTP and RCEP could eventually
converge into an FTAAP.
If no such convergence occurs, the FTAAP project would be
incomplete since the two major world economies, United States and China, would
not be linked by any agreement, the professors noted.
The different pathways leading to the FTAAP are
interdependent. According to Perez-Restrepo and Roldan-Perez, an ideal
pathway would be one that provides improved market access for the manufacturing
sector in the emerging economies while also offering substantial benefits for
services, investments, and high-tech industries in the advanced economies.
The Pacific Alliance (PA) is a regional integration process that
involves Colombia, and three APEC economies—Chile, Mexico, and Peru.
This alliance has been attracting the attention of the
international community. The group currently has 32 observer countries, eight
of which are APEC members.
Perez-Restrepo and Roldan-Perez said that based on the
provisions negotiated among the PA members on the areas of tariffs, trade
facilitation, services and investment liberalization, and new issues such as
intellectual property, environment, labor, and public procurement, the PA
offers an intermediate level of integration.
“The PA is not as ambitious as the TPP and thus could be more
interesting and lenient for APEC economies that are not ready or not willing to
commit to TPP’s high-level conditions. At the same time, the PA offers a deeper
form of integration than the RCEP,” the professors added.
Whatever pathway is chosen, researchers present during the
conference were all in agreement that APEC’s role is to serve as incubator of
innovative approaches to economic cooperation and as breeding ground and
mechanism for communication, exchange of best practices, and capacity building.
The APEC Study Centers Consortium Conference was part of the
Second Senior Officials Meeting (SOM2) and Related Meetings of APEC 2015.
It was organized by state think tank Philippine Institute for
Development Studies and the Philippine APEC Study Center Network in
collaboration with the Ateneo de Manila University and the Asian Development
Bank Institute.
The annual conference provides academics and scholars from
the different APEC study centers with a venue to discuss and exchange ideas on
the APEC themes and to identify areas for research collaboration.
The outputs of the conference may serve as inputs to the different
APEC working group discussions and may be integrated in the Leaders’ statement.
(mbcn/PIA7/with reports from Misha Borbon/PIDS