[asia-apec 641] ABAC September Report

[PAN Asia Pacific]

(Please note ABAC's proposed APEC Food System.  Does anybody know
what corporation is behind this suggestion?) 


APEC Secretariat Press Release 27/98
 
APEC Business Advisory Council Charts Strategy for November meeting with Leader 
 
Members of the APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC) agreed today on a package of 
measures to recommend to Economic Leaders to respond to the ongoing regional financial and 
economic turmoil. ABAC members developed the package during a three-day meeting in Chinese 
Taipei. 
 
ABAC, the private sector arm of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, has a mandate to 
advise APEC Leaders on issues affecting business in the region. The Council will deliver its 
recommendations in a series of letters to APEC Ministers in the coming days and will discuss them 
further when ABAC members meet with the Economic Leaders, November 17 in Kuala Lumpur. 
 
The business leaders stressed the need for urgent action to address the financial crisis and endorsed 
a number of specific recommendations for restoring confidence in the region and promoting inward 
capital flows. The package includes measures that ABAC recommends national economies take 
and also addresses the regional dimension of destabilizing capital flows. The package proposes 
special measures to redress the especially severe impact of the crisis on the region's small and 
medium-sized enterprises. 
 
As part of the package, ABAC also recommends that APEC Leaders reaffirm their commitment to 
continued trade and investment liberalization as vital to the region's long-term economic health. 
They urged APEC members to finalize a credible program of early voluntary sectoral liberalization 
at the November Ministerial meeting in Kuala Lumpur. At the same time, ABAC members stressed 
that while the benefits of trade and investment liberalization are clear, the ramifications of 
speculative currency trading in the absence of adequate governance structures are not clear and 
need to be urgently addressed. 
 
"This combination is all-important," said ABAC Chairman Tan Sri Tajudin Ramli of Malaysia. 
"Desperate times call for urgent tangible action by governments to restore growth in the affected 
economies. But APEC must also stick to its program of liberalization because this will also help get 
us over the crisis." 
 
While giving priority to the financial crisis, ABAC members finalized additional recommendations 
to be delivered to APEC governments. 
 
ABAC will reiterate its recommendations for establishing a sound enabling environment in which 
electronic commerce can flourish. The Council urges APEC governments to intensify efforts to 
help regional companies become Y2K compliant, with priority on the transport, medical, utilities 
and financial services sectors. 
 
ABAC also proposes a new joint public-private action plan to build an APEC Food System for the 
region. This would include promotion of trade in food products, upgrading of rural infrastructure 
and diffusion of new agricultural technologies. 
 
ABAC will present updated assessments of APEC member's individual action plans. Although 
transparency has improved, to become more useful to business people, future action plans should 
give more information about how each economy plans to reach the goal of free trade and 
investment in the region. ABAC also recommends that economies include in their plans their new 
commitments to respond to the financial crisis and their liberalization measures in the EVSL 
sectors. 
 
Council members also finalized plans to establish the Partnership for Equitable Growth, a new 
private sector-led organization that aims to increase business involvement in APEC's economic and 
technical cooperation, or "ecotech," activities. 
 
ABAC's 1998 report to APEC Leaders, to be released in November, will summarize its activities 
this year and the various recommendations it has made to Leaders and Ministers,