APEC ECONOMIC LEADERS' DECLARATION:
DELIVERING TO THE COMMUNITY
Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei Darussalam
16 November 2000
1. We, the Economic Leaders of APEC, meeting in Bandar Seri Begawan to consider
the challenges of the new millennium, reaffirm our confidence in the APEC vision
of a community of open and interdependent economies as the means to strengthen
our ability to grow together in the global market and deliver prosperity to
our people.
2. We renew our determination to bring this vision into reality through our
shared commitment to the Bogor goals of free and open trade and investment and
through our wide-ranging cooperation in building the capacity of our people,
our institutions, our infrastructure and our markets according to the action
agenda we agreed in Osaka.
3. We remain committed to the vision because we have seen how open economic
policies pursued by the economies of our region have been the driving force
in delivering impressive growth over two decades. This growth has resulted in
rising incomes, more opportunity, better education and a higher standard of
health for our people.
4. While the economic crisis was a setback in a decade of progress in APEC,
we have not allowed this to deter us from building upon the policies which have
given us rapid and stable economic growth. We are encouraged by the improvement
in economic and social conditions in the economies affected by the crisis and
by the signs of a return to strong economic growth in the regional economy as
a whole.
5. We note though the risks to the world economy posed by volatility in the
oil market. We call for appropriate measures to promote stability in the mutual
interests of consumers and producers. We welcome the efforts made this year
by APEC members to balance oil markets and note the many ongoing cooperation
activities within APEC which will help reduce vulnerability and promote market
stability.
6. We are determined not to be complacent in any of our efforts for continued
improvements to growth because we know that the same policies which are consolidating
the recovery will also enable us to integrate more confidently into the global
economy.
Managing Globalisation
7. As we view the options ahead, we are convinced that the movement towards
global integration holds the greatest opportunity to deliver higher living standards
and social well-being for our communities. We acknowledge that meeting the wide
range of social and economic challenges that globalisation poses will not always
be easy.
8. We understand that in all our economies there are people who have yet to
gain the benefits of economic growth, especially in rural and provincial communities.
We also appreciate that the many people who have been hard hit by the economic
crisis have had their faith in openness severely tested. As Leaders, bound by
a sense of shared prosperity and a mutual understanding of the difficulties
in each of our economies, we resolve to address the wide disparities in wealth
and knowledge and bring the benefits of globalisation to all our people. APEC's
economic and technical cooperation programs are already making a positive contribution
to this process but we believe they can be strengthened. We therefore ask our
Ministers and officials to ensure that the cooperation agenda is clearly targeted
and more focused to achieve practical outcomes which will help our economies
build the necessary capacity.
9. We resolve as well to continue our work in international forums to help shape
the global economy and provide a more secure and stable financial environment
for both developed and developing economies. Important lessons have been drawn
from the crisis of 1997-98. This understanding of the need for the right preventive
practices to reduce the risks of financial panic has been the focus of the international
community's response. We welcome the efforts of the G-20, the Financial Stability
Forum, the international financial institutions and other fora to strengthen
international financial architecture. These efforts include improving international
surveillance, strengthening regulatory and supervisory frameworks, and appropriately
involving private creditors in crisis resolution. They also involve cooperative
financing arrangements at the regional level that complement IMF resources and
reforms to the international financial institutions including the review of
quota/share allocation. We also thank ABAC for the extensive recommendations
it has made on implementation of these issues and ask that our Finance
Ministers examine them in the coming year.
10. Our ability to reap the benefits of globalisation will depend on the capacity
of our economies and our people to cope with ongoing change. The crisis has
already taught us much about the need for continuing structural reform and market
opening, and the importance of implementing sound economic policies. In particular,
it has alerted us to the importance of facilitating inevitable structural adjustments
to take up new opportunities and to the heavy costs of avoiding adjustment.
11. To better prepare ourselves for the future, we instruct all our Ministers
to make renewed efforts in APEC work on developing strategies to manage the
required structural adjustments more effectively. We ask them to include in
this, ways to look after those disadvantaged by economic change including through
continued work on social safety nets. We also ask them to include ways to develop
systems of good governance and robust institutional frameworks for the financial
and corporate sectors.
12. We note the importance our Finance Ministers have placed on building capacity
in these areas. We welcome their progress and further extension of work in a
wide range of programs, including skills development of financial regulators
and insurance regulators, and insolvency law reform and financial disclosure.
We encourage Finance Ministers to continue to share experiences and expertise
on key issues like privatisation and managing bank failures as well as
strengthening social safety nets to deepen the region's understanding of how
markets and institutions can be strengthened to face ongoing change.
Creating New Opportunities
13. There is no doubt that the revolution in information and communication technology
is dramatically boosting the development of a global economy. It carries with
it unprecedented opportunities in a new style of economy with new forms of markets,
higher levels of productivity and new demands for knowledge, entrepreneurship
and innovation.
14. We are encouraged that businesses and individuals even in traditional sectors
can also benefit from the new economy as the use of technology becomes more
widespread within each economy and throughout the region. However, we realise
that the technology and the benefits it can bring have not yet reached millions
of our people.
15. Our vision is to prepare each of our economies and all of our people to
use the technology revolution as a passport to the fruits of globalisation.
We announce today new strategies which we believe will profoundly improve the
livelihood of our community in the years ahead. We commit to develop and implement
a policy framework which will enable the people of urban, provincial and rural
communities in every economy to have individual or community-based access to
information and services offered via the internet by 2010. As a first step toward
this goal we aim to triple the number of people within the region with individual
and community-based access by 2005.
16. Governments alone cannot achieve this vision. We recognise that it will
require massive infrastructure development and human capacity building, and
technologies which are only now in their formative stages. It will require a
regime of outward-looking and market-oriented policies which can attract business
investment and the cooperation and skills of our universities, training and
research institutions, colleges and schools. We also recognise that the pace
of development and implementation of the appropriate policy framework will vary
in each economy because of the diversity among members and the widely different
levels at which information and communication technology is now integrated.
17. We commit to working in partnership with the widest spectrum of the business
community and those in education and training throughout the region to develop
the policies which can make it happen. As a first step toward building this
partnership and setting the agenda ahead, Brunei Darussalam and the People's
Republic of China will jointly host a high-level APEC meeting of business, government,
trainers and educators in China in 2001. We believe the outcome of
this meeting will provide useful views for APEC Ministers and APEC fora.
18. Today, we also launch a wide-ranging Action Agenda for the new economy that
outlines programs that will help our economies use advances in information technology
to boost productivity and stimulate growth and extend services to the whole
community. The Action Agenda includes ways to promote the right policy environment
and build capacity to help create a framework to strengthen markets, electronic
commerce, infrastructure, knowledge and skills development and provide affordable
and more efficient access to communications and the internet. We recognise that
this is only a start and we instruct all our Ministers and officials to develop
this program further in 2001. We urge wide consultation and interaction with
stakeholders in business and human capacity building as partners in our vision.
We welcome ABAC's contribution to these issues this year and encourage them
to continue that
cooperation.
19. We note that APEC has already made significant progress in strengthening
markets, developing human resources and promoting the development of small and
medium enterprises to support the development of the new economy. We are particularly
encouraged to see early success in the APEC E-Commerce Readiness Initiative
where, in partnership with the business community, APEC has established global
leadership in enabling economies to assess and improve their readiness for the
new economy.
20. We welcome the comprehensive package announced by Japan before the Kyushu-Okinawa
G8 Summit, to provide about US$15 billion for addressing the international digital
divide, noting that a significant proportion will be mobilised in the APEC economies.
21. We place particular emphasis on preparing our young people for the challenges
ahead and agree that information technology should be a core competency for
learning and teaching. We support APEC programs to enhance the quality of teachers
and build sound education management through a process of cooperation in education
in the region and commend the Association of Pacific Rim Universities and other
organisations for their initiatives to develop
distance learning capacity within the region. The new information and communication
technology also enables important networks to be developed to extend health
and medical services to the wider community and to address basic health issues.
We commend the progress already made in strengthening disease information networks.
We commit to fighting HIV/AIDS and other infectious
diseases and call on the relevant authorities to report in the next year on
a strategy which can be used in APEC to more effectively meet these disease
challenges.
Strengthening the Multilateral Trading
System
22. In this era of globalisation, a fair and rules-based multilateral trading
system is even more crucial to our success and prosperity. The system should
respond to the challenge of the 21st century.
23. We reiterate that there is a need to expeditiously launch a new WTO round
for the benefit of all WTO members, particularly least-developed and developing
economies. We agree that a balanced and sufficiently broad-based agenda that
responds to the interests and concerns of all WTO members should be formulated
and finalised as soon as possible in 2001 and that a round be launched in 2001.
The elements and objectives we agreed in Auckland remain relevant.
24. We instruct our Ministers to make meaningful progress in the agriculture
and services negotiations now underway. We also instruct them to continue the
preparatory work on industrial tariffs and other related areas, as part of the
preparation for a new round, without prejudice to the overall agenda for negotiations.
We reaffirm our commitment to the moratorium on the imposition of customs duties
on electronic transmissions until the next WTO Ministerial Meeting and we acknowledge
the importance of avoiding unnecessary measures restricting use and development
of electronic commerce. We endorse our Ministers' call for the establishment
of an ad hoc analytical task force in the WTO which would examine how WTO rules
are relevant to the evolution of electronic commerce.
25. We commend the confidence-building measures adopted in the WTO, including
those on market access for least-developed economies and those addressing concerns
over aspects of the
implementation of WTO agreements. We urge effective implementation and the participation
of more economies in the least-developed economies market access initiative.
26. To increase momentum toward the launch of a new round, we welcome the progress
made to develop the strategic APEC plan on building capacity to implement WTO
agreements. We endorse the strategic plan as it has been laid out and support
decisions by Ministers for its early implementation.
27. We welcome the substantial progress that has been made over the past year
in the WTO accession negotiations for China and urge rapid completion of these
negotiations so that China can join as soon as possible. We also support rapid
accession to the WTO by Chinese Taipei and the advancement of the accession
processes of Russia and Vietnam.
28. We note the recent developments in regional trading arrangements in the
Asia Pacific. We agree that regional and bilateral trade agreements should serve
as building blocks for multilateral
liberalisation in the WTO. We therefore affirm that the existing and emerging
regional trading agreements should be consistent with WTO rules and disciplines.
We also believe that these arrangements should be in line with APEC architecture
and supportive of APEC's goals and principles.
Making APEC Matter More
29. The people of the region are APEC's most valuable asset. We continue to
believe that APEC must be a process which is open and transparent and which
draws on the talents and creativity of our people. We strongly encourage the
continued engagement and outreach APEC has developed with our community and
seek to develop partnerships with groups which share, and will add impetus to,
our goals.
30. We are pleased to note the increasing participation of women in APEC programs
and the efforts to ensure that their participation is further facilitated and
increased.
31. Although much of APEC's work is investment in the future, we are pleased
that people are already gaining tangible and direct benefits from our earlier
programs. We are also encouraged by new programs which are targeted toward improving
access to information, the mobility of people and the flow of goods, services
and investment within the region.
32. Our Individual Action Plans remain the most important mechanism for laying
out our individual paths toward the Bogor goals of free and open trade and investment.
We want to ensure that action plans are transparent, comprehensive and specific,
and effectively communicated to business and the wider community. We therefore
instruct Ministers to ensure that the new e-IAP system released this year is
fully utilised and operational in 2001 and updated and improved as an electronic
tool in future years.
33. We encourage the business community to utilise our new BizAPEC website as
a tool for seeking new opportunities within the region and to facilitate their
trade and commerce. We ask our officials to make this a dynamic centre of information
and reflective of the ongoing
interests of business. This initiative, along with others implemented by APEC,
can facilitate small and medium enterprises in their efforts to build strategic
alliances and take up the advantages of international trade and investment.
34. We believe the APEC Ecotech Clearing House website is an important addition
to our electronic interaction with the community by providing a transparent
and ready mechanism to show the effectiveness of our extensive program of economic
and technical cooperation.
35. We continue to place the highest priority on facilitating the flow of goods
and services and to reducing the cost of international transactions for the
benefit of business and the consuming public. We know that progress in this
area has particular benefit for small and medium enterprises. We instruct our
Ministers to continue work on simplifying and harmonising our customs procedures
and standards and conformance as two priority areas highlighted by
ABAC and our business community. To provide a stronger basis for the future
work on improving facilitation, we urge intensive efforts by Ministers and officials
to produce a set of principles on trade facilitation in 2001 and ask them to
address trade facilitation in an integrated way so as to help lower the cost
of doing business in the region.
36. The future lies in our youth. The investments we make in encouraging them
to cherish the region's rich cultural diversity, and in the development of their
knowledge and skills, will to a large degree determine the future course of
globalisation. We welcome the wide-ranging programs offered by several economies
promoting the interaction of youth this year and we strongly encourage these
activities to continue in order to build a greater sense of community within
the Asia Pacific.
37. We attach to our Declaration a range of additional Directives to Ministers
and officials and an annex which outlines our Action Agenda for the New Economy.
