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Updated Thursday, November 11, 2010 9:40 pm TWN, AFP

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APEC needs new vision after stumbling on trade goals: survey

YOKOHAMA, Japan--APEC needs a “new vision” for the next decade after being seen as failing to meet a key milestone towards its goal of tearing down trade barriers by 2020, a survey showed Wednesday.

The survey of opinion leaders, carried out by the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council (PECC) think-tank, showed many believed that the 21-member grouping has not achieved the first of its two main targets.

Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders, meeting in the Indonesian city of Bogor in 1994, pledged to achieve a free trade and investment regime by 2010 for its developed members and 2020 for developing economies.

“In spite of the considerable achievements made in the region in lowering tariffs and non-tariff barriers, opinion leaders are unconvinced that the industrialized economies have met the Bogor Goals,” PECC said in a report.

APEC “needs a new vision to drive its agenda for the next 10 years,” said the study, released ahead of this weekend's summit of APEC leaders in the Japanese port city of Yokohama.

“We asked our respondents if they thought that in fact APEC has met its first 2010 goal and the answer is no, a very emphatic no, they have not,” report coordinator Woo Yuen Pau told reporters.

“At the same time, the respondents believe that with the 2010 targets now essentially behind us, there's an opportunity for APEC to come up with a new vision, a new focus for its activities and a new way of framing APEC's mission.”

In a draft statement obtained by AFP Wednesday, the bloc's leaders implicitly conceded they had not met the 2010 goals, saying that while they had made significant headway, there was still “some way to go.”

Woo said that Japan, this year's APEC chair, has steered the group towards pushing for structural reform among members as a way to sustain the region's rebound from the economic downturn and address global trade imbalances.

“While there's a lot of action to be done still, it signals that APEC has a niche to fill which is on the structural reform agenda,” he said, referring to financial and regulatory measures.

APEC, which groups 21 Pacific Rim economies stretching from Chile to China via the United States, achieves decisions by consensus and its commitments are not legally binding — leading to charges it is merely a talk shop.

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