APEC Focused on Inclusive Trade Rather Than Market Access

The executive director of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Secretariat said the perspective of what purpose APEC serves has changed. "We used to say trade and investment are our bread and butter," Rebecca Sta Maria said, referring to the goals of the 21 countries in the forum.

"Those were the days we just talked about market access. Today, the reality is different," she said. Now, she said, the reality is you "can’t talk about trade and investment without talking about the effect on human rights."

APEC was hosted in San Francisco, and was the reason that Chinese President Xi Jinping was in the country so that he could meet with President Joe Biden. The Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, which includes most of the APEC countries, also had a negotiating round and a signing ceremony just before the APEC meeting began.

Laura Lane, UPS executive vice president and chief corporate affairs and sustainability officer, spoke at a webinar Nov. 21 hosted by the Asia Society Policy Institute about what APEC achieved. Lane said now everyone realizes that the benefits of trade have to be broadly shared. Lane, who was involved in the private sector adjunct to the governmental meeting, said she was pleased that her group put together a supply chain resilience toolkit, which she said they wanted to be practical, particularly for small businesses.

Lane said that more than 1,200 businesses from 15 countries helped develop it, and the group has been hosting workshops on how to use it. She said she'll be traveling to China next week to host a workshop.

Supply chain resilience was the first of the IPEF pillars to be agreed to. Lane said that in an APEC context, investors should understand their investments are more robust if producers understand their supply chains spread across the region.

Lane said the incomplete trade pillar in IPEF -- which, among other priorities, focuses on trade facilitation improvements -- also is crucial.

"If everything stops at the border because you don’t have effective trade facilitation" then the benefits of trade are not as great as you thought, she said.

She said trade facilitation needs to be "built into everything you do, so it isn’t just the big businesses, but also the small and medium sized businesses" that can participate in international trade.

Matt Murray, U.S. senior adviser for APEC, said that when he became responsible for coordinating APEC's activities this year, he asked other countries how APEC should deal with China. He said he was told: "Look, the other 19 economies don’t come to APEC meetings to watch mom and dad fight."

Murray said that while the U.S. and China didn't agree on everything, he "wanted to get away from an environment where we reflexively objected to everything they said, and they reflexively objected to everything we said."

"Many of the outcomes you see in the Golden Gate declaration, they only happened because of long-term constructive engagement with China," he said.