Delivering to the community
APEC ECONOMIC LEADERS¡¯ DECLARATION
BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN, BRUENI DARUSSALAM
16 Nov 2000

1. We, the Economic Leaders of APEC, meeting in Bandar Seri
Begawan to consider the challenges of the new millennium, reaffirm
our confidence in the APEC vision of a community of open and
interdependent economies as the means to strengthen our ability to
grow together in the global market and deliver prosperity to our
people.

2. We renew our determination to bring this vision into reality through
our shared commitment to the Bogor goals of free and open trade
and investment and through our wide-ranging cooperation in building
the capacity of our people, our institutions, our infrastructure and our
markets according to the action agenda we agreed in Osaka.

3. We remain committed to the vision because we have seen how open
economic policies pursued by the economies of our region have been
the driving force in delivering impressive growth over two decades.
This growth has resulted in rising incomes, more opportunity, better
education and a higher standard of health for our people.

4. While the economic crisis was a setback in a decade of progress in
APEC, we have not allowed this to deter us from building upon the
policies which have given us rapid and stable economic growth. We
are encouraged by the improvement in economic and social
conditions in the economies affected by the crisis and by the signs of
a return to strong economic growth in the regional economy as a
whole.

5. We note though the risks to the world economy posed by volatility in
the oil market. We call for appropriate measures to promote stability
in the mutual interests of consumers and producers. We welcome the
efforts made this year by APEC members to balance oil markets and
note the many ongoing cooperation activities within APEC which will
help reduce vulnerability and promote market stability.

6. We are determined not to be complacent in any of our efforts for
continued improvements to growth because we know that the same
policies which are consolidating the recovery will also enable us to
integrate more confidently into the global economy.

Managing Globalisation

7. As we view the options ahead, we are convinced that the movement
towards global integration holds the greatest opportunity to deliver
higher living standards and social well-being for our communities.
We acknowledge that meeting the wide range of social and economic
challenges that globalisation poses will not always be easy.

8. We understand that in all our economies there are people who have
yet to gain the benefits of economic growth, especially in rural and
provincial communities. We also appreciate that the many people
who have been hard hit by the economic crisis have had their faith in
openness severely tested. As Leaders, bound by a sense of shared
prosperity and a mutual understanding of the difficulties in each of
our economies, we resolve to address the wide disparities in wealth
and knowledge and bring the benefits of globalisation to all our
people. APEC¡¯s economic and technical cooperation programs are
already making a positive contribution to this process but we believe
they can be strengthened. We therefore ask our Ministers and
officials to ensure that the cooperation agenda is clearly targeted and
more focused to achieve practical outcomes which will help our
economies build the necessary capacity.

9. We resolve as well to continue our work in international forums to
help shape the global economy and provide a more secure and
stable financial environment for both developed and developing
economies. Important lessons have been drawn from the crisis of
1997-98. This understanding of the need for the right preventive
practices to reduce the risks of financial panic has been the focus of
the international community¡¯s response. We welcome the efforts of
the G-20, the Financial Stability Forum, the international financial
institutions and other fora to strengthen international financial
architecture. These efforts include improving international
surveillance, strengthening regulatory and supervisory frameworks,
and appropriately involving private creditors in crisis resolution.
They also involve cooperative financing arrangements at the regional
level that complement IMF resources and reforms to the international
financial institutions including the review of quota/share allocation.
We also thank ABAC for the extensive recommendations it has
made on implementation of these issues and ask that our Finance
Ministers examine them in the coming year.

10. Our ability to reap the benefits of globalisation will depend on the
capacity of our economies and our people to cope with ongoing
change. The crisis has already taught us much about the need for
continuing structural reform and market opening, and the importance
of implementing sound economic policies. In particular, it has alerted
us to the importance of facilitating inevitable structural adjustments to
take up new opportunities and to the heavy costs of avoiding
adjustment.

11. To better prepare ourselves for the future, we instruct all our
Ministers to make renewed efforts in APEC work on developing
strategies to manage the required structural adjustments more
effectively. We ask them to include in this, ways to look after those
disadvantaged by economic change including through continued work
on social safety nets. We also ask them to include ways to develop
systems of good governance and robust institutional frameworks for
the financial and corporate sectors.

12. We note the importance our Finance Ministers have placed on
building capacity in these areas. We welcome their progress and
further extension of work in a wide range of programs, including skills
development of financial regulators and insurance regulators, and
insolvency law reform and financial disclosure. We encourage
Finance Ministers to continue to share experiences and expertise on
key issues like privatisation and managing bank failures as well as
strengthening social safety nets to deepen the region¡¯s understanding
of how markets and institutions can be strengthened to face ongoing
change.

Creating New Opportunities

13. There is no doubt that the revolution in information and
communication technology is dramatically boosting the development
of a global economy. It carries with it unprecedented opportunities
in a new style of economy with new forms of markets, higher levels
of productivity and new demands for knowledge, entrepreneurship
and innovation.

14. We are encouraged that businesses and individuals even in traditional
sectors can also benefit from the new economy as the use of
technology becomes more widespread within each economy and
throughout the region. However, we realise that the technology and
the benefits it can bring have not yet reached millions of our people.

15. Our vision is to prepare each of our economies and all of our people
to use the technology revolution as a passport to the fruits of
globalisation. We announce today new strategies which we believe
will profoundly improve the livelihood of our community in the years
ahead. We commit to develop and implement a policy framework
which will enable the people of urban, provincial and rural
communities in every economy to have individual or
community-based access to information and services offered via the
internet by 2010. As a first step toward this goal we aim to triple the
number of people within the region with individual and
community-based access by 2005.

16. Governments alone cannot achieve this vision. We recognise that it
will require massive infrastructure development and human capacity
building, and technologies which are only now in their formative
stages. It will require a regime of outward-looking and
market-oriented policies which can attract business investment and
the cooperation and skills of our universities, training and research
institutions, colleges and schools. We also recognise that the pace of
development and implementation of the appropriate policy
framework will vary in each economy because of the diversity among
members and the widely different levels at which information and
communication technology is now integrated.

17. We commit to working in partnership with the widest spectrum of the
business community and those in education and training throughout
the region to develop the policies which can make it happen. As a
first step toward building this partnership and setting the agenda
ahead, Brunei Darussalam and the People¡¯s Republic of China will
jointly host a high-level APEC meeting of business, government,
trainers and educators in China in 2001. We believe the outcome of
this meeting will provide useful views for APEC Ministers and APEC
fora.

18. Today, we also launch a wide-ranging Action Agenda for the new
economy that outlines programs that will help our economies use
advances in information technology to boost productivity and
stimulate growth and extend services to the whole community. The
Action Agenda includes ways to promote the right policy
environment and build capacity to help create a framework to
strengthen markets, electronic commerce, infrastructure, knowledge
and skills development and provide affordable and more efficient
access to communications and the internet. We recognise that this is
only a start and we instruct all our Ministers and officials to develop
this program further in 2001. We urge wide consultation and
interaction with stakeholders in business and human capacity building
as partners in our vision. We welcome ABAC¡¯s contribution to
these issues this year and encourage them to continue that
cooperation.

19. We note that APEC has already made significant progress in
strengthening markets, developing human resources and promoting
the development of small and medium enterprises to support the
development of the new economy. We are particularly encouraged
to see early success in the APEC E-Commerce Readiness Initiative
where, in partnership with the business community, APEC has
established global leadership in enabling economies to assess and
improve their readiness for the new economy.

20. We welcome the comprehensive package announced by Japan
before the Kyushu-Okinawa G8 Summit, to provide about US$15
billion for addressing the international digital divide, noting that a
significant proportion will be mobilised in the APEC economies.

21. We place particular emphasis on preparing our young people for the
challenges ahead and agree that information technology should be a
core competency for learning and teaching. We support APEC
programs to enhance the quality of teachers and build sound
education management through a process of cooperation in
education in the region and commend the Association of Pacific Rim
Universities and other organisations for their initiatives to develop
distance learning capacity within the region. The new information
and communication technology also enables important networks to
be developed to extend health and medical services to the wider
community and to address basic health issues. We commend the
progress already made in strengthening disease information
networks. We commit to fighting HIV/AIDS and other infectious
diseases and call on the relevant authorities to report in the next year
on a strategy which can be used in APEC to more effectively meet
these disease challenges.

Strengthening the Multilateral Trading System

22. In this era of globalisation, a fair and rules-based multilateral trading
system is even more crucial to our success and prosperity. The
system should respond to the challenge of the 21st century.

23. We reiterate that there is a need to expeditiously launch a new WTO
round for the benefit of all WTO members, particularly
least-developed and developing economies. We agree that a
balanced and sufficiently broad-based agenda that responds to the
interests and concerns of all WTO members should be formulated
and finalised as soon as possible in 2001 and that a round be
launched in 2001. The elements and objectives we agreed in
Auckland remain relevant.

24. We instruct our Ministers to make meaningful progress in the
agriculture and services negotiations now underway. We also
instruct them to continue the preparatory work on industrial tariffs
and other related areas, as part of the preparation for a new round,
without prejudice to the overall agenda for negotiations. We reaffirm
our commitment to the moratorium on the imposition of customs
duties on electronic transmissions until the next WTO Ministerial
Meeting and we acknowledge the importance of avoiding
unnecessary measures restricting use and development of electronic
commerce. We endorse our Ministers¡¯ call for the establishment of
an ad hoc analytical task force in the WTO which would examine
how WTO rules are relevant to the evolution of electronic
commerce.

25. We commend the confidence-building measures adopted in the
WTO, including those on market access for least-developed
economies and those addressing concerns over aspects of the
implementation of WTO agreements. We urge effective
implementation and the participation of more economies in the
least-developed economies market access initiative.

26. To increase momentum toward the launch of a new round, we
welcome the progress made to develop the strategic APEC plan on
building capacity to implement WTO agreements. We endorse the
strategic plan as it has been laid out and support decisions by
Ministers for its early implementation.

27. We welcome the substantial progress that has been made over the
past year in the WTO accession negotiations for China and urge
rapid completion of these negotiations so that China can join as soon
as possible. We also support rapid accession to the WTO by
Chinese Taipei and the advancement of the accession processes of
Russia and Vietnam.

28. We note the recent developments in regional trading arrangements in
the Asia Pacific. We agree that regional and bilateral trade
agreements should serve as building blocks for multilateral
liberalisation in the WTO. We therefore affirm that the existing and
emerging regional trading agreements should be consistent with
WTO rules and disciplines. We also believe that these arrangements
should be in line with APEC architecture and supportive of APEC¡¯s
goals and principles.

Making APEC Matter More

29. The people of the region are APEC¡¯s most valuable asset. We
continue to believe that APEC must be a process which is open and
transparent and which draws on the talents and creativity of our
people. We strongly encourage the continued engagement and
outreach APEC has developed with our community and seek to
develop partnerships with groups which share, and will add impetus
to, our goals.

30. We are pleased to note the increasing participation of women in
APEC programs and the efforts to ensure that their participation is
further facilitated and increased.

31. Although much of APEC¡¯s work is investment in the future, we are
pleased that people are already gaining tangible and direct benefits
from our earlier programs. We are also encouraged by new
programs which are targeted toward improving access to information,
the mobility of people and the flow of goods, services and investment
within the region.

32. Our Individual Action Plans remain the most important mechanism for
laying out our individual paths toward the Bogor goals of free and
open trade and investment. We want to ensure that action plans are
transparent, comprehensive and specific, and effectively
communicated to business and the wider community. We therefore
instruct Ministers to ensure that the new e-IAP system released this
year is fully utilised and operational in 2001 and updated and
improved as an electronic tool in future years.

33. We encourage the business community to utilise our new BizAPEC
website as a tool for seeking new opportunities within the region and
to facilitate their trade and commerce. We ask our officials to make
this a dynamic centre of information and reflective of the ongoing
interests of business. This initiative, along with others implemented
by APEC, can facilitate small and medium enterprises in their efforts
to build strategic alliances and take up the advantages of international
trade and investment.

34. We believe the APEC Ecotech Clearing House website is an
important addition to our electronic interaction with the community
by providing a transparent and ready mechanism to show the
effectiveness of our extensive program of economic and technical
cooperation.

35. We continue to place the highest priority on facilitating the flow of
goods and services and to reducing the cost of international
transactions for the benefit of business and the consuming public.
We know that progress in this area has particular benefit for small
and medium enterprises. We instruct our Ministers to continue work
on simplifying and harmonising our customs procedures and
standards and conformance as two priority areas highlighted by
ABAC and our business community. To provide a stronger basis for
the future work on improving facilitation, we urge intensive efforts by
Ministers and officials to produce a set of principles on trade
facilitation in 2001 and ask them to address trade facilitation in an
integrated way so as to help lower the cost of doing business in the
region.

36. The future lies in our youth. The investments we make in encouraging
them to cherish the region¡¯s rich cultural diversity, and in the
development of their knowledge and skills, will to a large degree
determine the future course of globalisation. We welcome the
wide-ranging programs offered by several economies promoting the
interaction of youth this year and we strongly encourage these
activities to continue in order to build a greater sense of community
within the Asia Pacific.

37. We attach to our Declaration a range of additional Directives to
Ministers and officials and an annex which outlines our Action
Agenda for the New Economy.