11 - Business Involvement in APEC

Summary

APEC and the Business Community: Involvement and Expectations

One characteristic makes APEC unique in the long history of government to-government international organizations: it has allowed the private sector to play a more direct and influential role in its deliberations than any similar organization. The business community's involvement in APEC has been the impetus for some of the organization's most significant accomplishments. The private sector's high expectations are a healthy impetus to APEC action: when business invests time and resources in an issue, it expects concrete results in the relatively near term. These expectations can be disappointed when the APEC process, based on forming a consensus that even one member can disrupt, produces inadequate or no results, and takes too long to do so.

The opportunities and modalities of business involvement in APEC are as broad and varied as the APEC structure itself. One of APEC's genuine strengths has been the window it provides for private sector initiative and entrepreneurship, and the commitment of resources, interest, and energy from the business community has helped APEC achieve very practical goals, such as the online training being provided by the private sector through the APEC human capacity building promotion plan. Through APEC, business has been able to co-operate with governments to effect change in policies in the direction of more liberalized trade and greater business facilitation — in other words, change that has a positive impact on economic growth and raising living standards in the region. It is against this benchmark of concrete changes in government regulatory and other policies that business judges the results of its involvement in APEC.

The breadth and scope of formal and informal vehicles for business involvement in APEC is striking. The APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC) was created by the Leaders as the official voice of the private sector and meets directly with the Leaders, providing an annual report with specific recommendations. Numerous other levels of the APEC hierarchy include interactions with the private sector that range from ongoing, substantial participation in the group's activities to one-day conferences associated with major meetings. Virtually every Working Group and other APEC subgroups officially welcome the participation of business, and private sector representatives are often included in official delegations to a range of APEC meetings. This chapter will examine the processes and results that have evolved from this varied landscape of activities.