APEC Singapore 2009 Official Thread
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After F1 Electrical rates up to 21% , (http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Singapore/Story/STIStory_284015.html)
So guys, after APEC meeting what will be increase ?
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www.apec2009.sg
all discussion about the event in this thread ONLY
any trigger-happy threads will be deleted and threadstarter dealt with -
Will the luxury cars used to ferry APEC officials be sold cheaply to local residents again as in the case of the last APEC ?
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sure, my dad bought the BM and sold at a good price. But only can offer one to one.
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Ts,
we are still having a discussion on that
Will let u know later...
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PM Lee urges APEC to look after the region's poor, but is he looking after those in Singapore? Does he understand the meaning of hypocrisy?
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Obama's Human Rights Opportunity in Singapore
The effusive praise President Barack Obama has for former Singaporean Prime Minister and now Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew is another gesture that has led many to wonder where the present administration sits on human rights issues. The forthcoming APEC summit in Singapore presents an opportunity for the president to set the record straight.....Read More
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APEC
KUALA LUMPUR ????
MANNY PACQUIAO PHILIPPPINES V.S. COTTO PUERTO RICO
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Clock winds down on APEC
By Megawati Wijaya
SINGAPORE - When government and business leaders meet this week at the 20th Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) annual summit in Singapore, they will face the uphill task of renewing the grouping's commitment to free trade amid rising protectionism among its 21 member countries.
Even with economic recovery on the global horizon, various APEC member countries, including most crucially the United States and China, are locked in trade disputes marked by the imposition of escalating tit-for-tat tariff and non-tariff measures. As a key deadline for market opening approaches next year, APEC's broad goal of establishing the world's largest free trade area is in jeopardy.
When APEC leaders met last year in Lima, Peru, the global economy faced its worst financial crisis in recent history. APEC priorities were temporarily shifted to achieving economic stability and recovery, including backing for extraordinary monetary and fiscal stimulus measures, rather than pushing the grouping's primary free-trade agenda.
APEC leaders then vowed not to resort to protectionist measures to cushion their falling economies, including a vow to refrain for a calendar year from raising new barriers to investment or trade or new export restrictions. They also followed through on an ambitious and balanced conclusion to the Doha Development Agenda World Trade Organization negotiations to provide the basis for more trade-driven global growth.
Those commitments were consistent with APEC's broad goals and ambitions. In November 1994, former US president Bill Clinton and the leaders of APEC's then 18 member countries signed a declaration in Bogor, Indonesia, setting a goal to establish free and open trade in the Asia-Pacific region for developed countries by 2010.
The same goal for developing countries was set for 2020. In the following meeting in Osaka, Japan, APEC identified trade and investment liberalization, business facilitation, and economic and technical cooperation as the measures needed to achieve regional free trade.
To be sure, there has been substantial progress. Average tariffs among APEC economies have been slashed from 17% in 1989 to 5.5% in 2004. Freer trade and more-open economies have sparked robust economic growth. Today APEC is home to 10 of the Group of 20's member countries and members account for 40% of the world's population and 70% of its economic growth.
Protectionist tideStill, APEC has failed to stem rising protectionism among its member states, while other often preferential bilateral and multilateral agreements have recently trumped many countries' commitment to APEC's aims and ambitions.
The move towards more APEC protectionism was ushered in earlier this year when the US House of Representatives passed "Buy American" provisions to the country's massive fiscal stimulus package, including requirements that public works projects use only US-made steel, iron and other manufactured goods.
Since January, the Barack Obama administration has also launched over a dozen anti-dumping of countervailing duty investigations against various Chinese imported products. Last week, for instance, Washington imposed preliminary anti-dumping duties ranging up to 99% on US$2.63 billion of Chinese-made oil-well pipes, representing the biggest US trade action against China in terms of volume. The US had earlier imposed countervailing duties on the product ranging from 10.9% to 30.69%.
In September, the US imposed safeguard duties on Chinese-made tires after a complaint by US unions that cheap Chinese imports had forced many US factories to close down. In return, China launched anti-dumping and anti-subsidy investigations into its imports of US poultry and automotive parts.
In August, the US claimed that China had curbed the import and distribution of foreign publications and audiovisual products in violation of its commitments to the World Trade Organization. The US won its claim, though China may yet appeal.
Former Chinese vice minister of commerce Wei Jianguo said in a recent interview with current affairs magazine Southern Wind that China, "must make preparations to fight a trade war". "Every country opposes trade protectionism but in reality their actions are not as they claim ... China must be decisive and not at all polite," he said.
Overcoming these protectionist threats will top APEC's agenda. Christopher Dent from the East Asian Studies of the University of Leeds says that textiles, footwear, petrochemicals, steel and other sensitive trade sectors will be "hard rocks" in the path of concluding new free trade deals.
Sri Adiningsih, chairwoman of the Asia-Pacific Study Center of Indonesia's Gajah Mada University, says that the fear of liberalism and threat of protectionism will prevail as long as there are economic disparities among APEC member economies. She says that while APEC had been on the right track for the past decade in moving towards free trade, once a crisis emerges its member countries go back to their old protectionist stances. She predicts that the current surge in non-tariff protectionism will continue until economies recover more firmly and unemployment statistics ease.
APEC works based on voluntary and non-binding principles and takes decisions through consensus. At the APEC 1997 summit in Vancouver, Canada, leaders introduced an Early Voluntary Sectoral Liberalization (EVSL) framework to encourage member economies to pursue voluntary liberalization of certain non-sensitive sectors. Yet APEC has no means to enforce its free-trade principles upon its members.
"Some members may just quit the group, and APEC may collapse," predicted Johnny Chiang, deputy executive director of the Chinese Taipei APEC Study Center.Competing FTA's
Indeed, the failure of APEC to establish a regional free-trade area has opened the way for the proliferation of numerous free-trade agreements (FTA) in the Asia-Pacific region. Dent notes that the region has become host to the world's fastest-growing concentration of new FTAs.
In 1997-98. there were only eight FTA projects in the entire Asia-Pacific region, including the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) formed in 1993 and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) AFTA project. By the end of 2002, the region was host to a total of 45 FTA projects in various stages of development, and by 2007 there were close to 150 bilateral FTA's that were concluded or works-in-progress.
The FTA phenomenon has become a new defining feature of the Asia-Pacific region's political economy, and bilateral FTAs are now seen as the most viable way to advance freer trade in the region, says Dent. They also constitute new mechanisms for cultivating closer economic and political ties, such as the bilateral FTA between Japan and South Korea that is playing an integral role in the political reconciliation process.
Analysts say these FTAs have arisen from APEC's failure to play a more assertive in pushing regional trade liberalization. Although FTA's theoretically achieve the same free trade goals set out at Bogor, they have challenged the guiding principles and modus operandi of APEC's "open regionalism", said Dent.
APEC members have shown a preference for simultaneous and direct quid pro quos in bilateral and multilateral trade deals, rather than voluntarily contributing to a common pool of trade liberation benefits from which all contributors may draw.
APEC's goal of concerted unilateral liberalization and the voluntary EVSL program have been displaced by more bilateral approaches to liberalization. FTA's preferential provisions, analysts say, run against the fundamental multilateral principles of both APEC and the WTO. FTA negotiations are time and resource intensive and their growing number in the region may divert focus from bigger regional groupings such as APEC or the WTO's Doha Development Agenda, said Chiang.
The plethora of bilateral and regional trade agreements in the APEC region is commonly referred to as the "noodle bowl" of agreements, invoking the image of intersecting, overlapping-and potentially confusing-trade arrangements that economies make with one another. Such arrangements, which allow countries to more carefully calibrate each trade relationship, make political sense for governments. But from a trade perspective, the sheer number of treaties increases the complexity, cost, and administrative burdens of doing business in the region.
Various recommendations have been made, either within formal APEC processes or on the informal sidelines, to keep APEC relevant and its free trade goals on track. At a pre-summit symposium in Mexico held in 2002, free-trade economist and long-standing APEC advocate Fred Bergsten proposed that the organization should adopt a new broad goal of realizing "shared prosperity in the region" in parallel to the Bogor goals.
That, he said, would help to overcome entrenched resistance to liberalization driven by the different backgrounds and stages of development of APEC's member countries. Although the proposal did not recommend fiscal redistribution among member states, or even a move towards a European Union-type trade bloc, APEC leaders then sidestepped the proposal and simply pledged "to continue and accelerate" its movement towards the Bogor goals.
At the 2006 APEC meeting in Hanoi, Vietnam, the APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC), consisting of private sector members from the region, called on APEC leaders to develop a trade and investment alternative in the Asia-Pacific region in the form of an overarching Free Trade Agreement Asia Pacific (FTAAP) to counter the over-proliferation of regional and bilateral FTAs. APEC country leaders agreed to discuss the feasibility of an FTAAP at the 2007 summit in Australia, but until now its framework has not progressed.
At this week's summit, APEC chair Singapore has put a new emphasis on supply-chain connectivity and aims to help trade by removing various logistical barriers. While the topic is widely viewed as practical to the APEC trading community, it will do little to advance the more ambitious aim of creating an Asia-Pacific free-trade bloc. But with a rising tide of protectionism among its members, it's not clear how much time APEC has left.
Note:
1. The 21 members of APEC are: Australia; Brunei Darussalam; Canada; Chile; People's Republic of China; Hong Kong, China; Indonesia; Japan; Republic of Korea; Malaysia; Mexico; New Zealand; Papua New Guinea; Peru; The Philippines; Russia; Singapore; Chinese Taipei; Thailand; the United States, Vietnam.
Megawati Wijaya is a Singapore-based journalist. She may be contacted at [email protected]. -
would GE be held after this thingie? Would this impress citizens?
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what was there to glow? may i asked...? Could anyone let me know what happen to the climate or enviornmental issued?
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I guess Singapore should stop hosting APEC summits...
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Originally posted by Yxxxone:
PM Lee urges APEC to look after the region's poor, but is he looking after those in Singapore? Does he understand the meaning of hypocrisy?
Seems like the thunderstrike party never stop to practise double standard.
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Originally posted by Uncle4edgar:
I guess Singapore should stop hosting APEC summits...
I paid $2500 over dollars for road tax, and i cannot travel on certain road when Apec or F1 is here, you think fair or not? 2.4cc -
Originally posted by angel7030:
I paid $2500 over dollars for road tax, and i cannot travel on certain road when Apec or F1 is here, you think fair or not? 2.4ccGo and die!
