|
|
|
|
CIAO DATE: 3/5/2007
From Poster Child to Orphan: The Rise and Demise of APEC
John Ravenhill
January 2007
Abstract
This article offers an overview of the rise and demise of APEC. It takes the "high" of the Bogor Declaration in 1994, when leaders committed themselves to an ambitious (and subsequently unfulfilled) program of trade liberalisation, and the "low" of the 1998 summit in Kuala Lumpur where leaders could not even agree on sectoral trade liberalisation (or on what to do about the Asian financial crisis) as key moments in APEC's recent past. As well as pointing to tensions over APEC's principles and purposes, it identifies two other important factors: the "two-level game" challenge, by which domestic pressures and expectations increasingly came to influence multilateral outcomes; and the growing problems of a lack of organisational and political leadership.