Towards a Single Market: A 21st Century Vision for Asia Pacific Economic Integration

APEC leaders can take pride in progress towards free and open trade. There will always be more to do to integrate Asia Pacific economies. 2010 is the time to look beyond border barriers to trade and adopt a new post-Bogor vision of a single market. Traditional border barriers to trade in some sensitive products remain costly, but affect only a rapidly shrinking part of international commerce. Today, it is more efficient to concentrate on problems of communications and logistics, combined with the lack of efficiency, transparency and sometimes arbitrary implementation of economic policies in different economies. The effective constraint on collective action to deal with these problems is not political will. It is limited capacity to design and implement the necessary policy reform. Creating the necessary capacity needs a unifying vision to deal all obstacles to genuine economic integration, that is, to build a single market. In doing so, Asia Pacific governments can learn from the European Union experience. But they need to promote ever-deeper economic integration without relying on a supra-national authority. Like free and open trade, a single market is a vision which can only be approached, rather than reached by any deadline－it is a point of reference for the many things that need to be done to integrate Asia Pacific economies in a meaningful way. Asia Pacific governments should be encouraged to set their own medium-term targets for progress towards well-defined ingredients of a single market. Strict selection criteria should be used to identify options for cooperation which build on what APEC is already doing and which are in line with the priorities of most member economies. An ambitious program to enhance the efficiency of supply chains could set a successful example and generate the confidence to do more.