The World

By Alan Beattie, FT World Trade Editor

To the usual putdowns of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation – “four adjectives in search of a noun” and “A Perfect Excuse to Chat” – my colleague Kevin Brown has added another ahead of this week’s big meeting: “a grouping that speaks for half the global economy but decides almost nothing”. If anything, this is a mild understatement.

Still, Apec has been doing its best to prove its relevance: here is a paper arguing that Apec members see more trade integration amongst themselves than do non-Apec members. It’s careful not to delineate a firm causal link, and just as well – even as it is the paper verges on blatant goalhanging in inviting us to infer some relationship.

More likely is that Apec was lucky enough to include all the countries (Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, later on China and Vietnam, etc) that organised themselves into the “Factory Asia” disaggregated supply chain – and which was focused on western markets. And not even the actual bilateral trade agreements in the region (as opposed to Apec’s “voluntary” i.e. toothless one) contributed much to that process either (see previous link). Meanwhile,  pace one very vocal advocate, the chances of turning Apec into a proper free trade zone are the square root of Doha.

The best reason for Apec, one east Asian official once confided to me sotto voce, was that it forced the US president to travel to Asia at least once a year. But surely any good CEO visits his biggest suppliers and creditors regularly in any case?