APEC and Thailand

APEC, or the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, was founded in 1989. At that time, it had only 12 members, but it has ended expanded to 18 members, including Hong Kong and the United States. The pact was formed to promote economic cooperation in the region, and in relationship to the United States. It has generally supported free trade efforts and the expansion of trade, although critics indicate it has been overly fond of rhetoric and less interested in hammering out action plans and concrete agreements (Much ado: APEC, 1996). President Clinton raised the APEC conference to full summit status in 1993.

The Asian miracle started to become an Asian crisis during the early part of this year. In Thailand, problems began in February and escalated through the middle of the year. Essentially, the problem started when foreign investors began to lose confidence in Thailand. They started pulling money out of the country which created a panic in which foreign investors and Thai companies began converting their bahts to dollars. The Thai central bank responded by buying up baht with its dollar reserves, trying to prop up the currency. It also raised i

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The goal for APEC members is to gradually eliminate tariffs and trade barriers over the next few years (Connelly, 1997). Another major accomplishment of the conference - although the details had been worked out earlier - was endorsement of many of the features of the Manila plan that had been put together during the preceding week. This plan was designed to work in tandem with the IMF bail-out plan in order to assist the countries to recover from the recent economic downturns. This was directly relevant to Thailand, adding to its package from the IMF. In addition, the group talked about creating a regional fund that would provide bailout loans to Asian countries in lieu of the IMF, in case of difficulties with that entity. There were several other issues of importance, although not all were resolved during these few days. In general, the countries have agreed to seek more transparency in the region's financial systems, for example, working together to make financial transactions between countries easier. In the area of banking, there were two main emphases. First, business leaders sought to have banking regulations tightened so that currency speculators would have more difficulty in operating. In another move designed to
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Approximate Word count = 1463
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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