Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation APEC: Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation in Evol

APEC is not one of the better-known international organizations, even though it is enormous in geographical scope, and includes several of the world's leading economies. The very vastness of its range, and of the region's potential, have posed a continuing challenge to the development of APEC. The very name, Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation, was described by former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans as "four adjectives in search of a noun" (Morrison, 1998, p. 9).

The original membership of APEC, represented at the Canberra meeting in 1989, included the six thencurrent members of ASEAN, the Association of South East Asian Nations  Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. It also included what are described as "the five developed nations" of Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States, as well as South Korea (Morrison, 1998, p. 9).

It is indicative of the astonishing pace of economic development in East Asia that the author cited above identifies "the five developed nations" in the original membership separately from South Korea. While the phrase is taken from a 1998 reference, the phrase undoubtedly represents assumptions made in source documents contemporary with the establishment of APEC two decades earlier.

No one today would think of describing South Korea as anything other than a "developed nation." Two decades previously, howev

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n global organizations, such as the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. Regional cooperative arrangements were confined mainly to Europe, where the original Common Market of the 1950s gradually evolved into the European Community, and ultimately into today's European Union. The European example encouraged consideration of other regional economic entities and regimes  a "regime" in this sense meaning a codification of standards and mechanisms for resolving disputes. By about 1980, proposals were being aired for establishment of some such entity in the AsianPacific region. These proposals were, however, initially opposed by the one existing Asian regional organization that had taken on significant life of its own: ASEAN, the Association of South East Asian Nations (Morrison, 1998, p. 4). The primary concern of ASEAN, which then comprised Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, was that its members would find themselves submerged within any organization of larger regional scope, particularly one that included such major powers as Japan and the United States. Amid such large economies, ASEAN feared, its own members' much smaller econo
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Some common words found in the essay are:
East Asian, Asian APEC, Policy Issues, Pacific Pacific, Cold War, Outlook Future, La Croix, Persons EPG, South Korea, Southeast Asian, morrison 1998, south korea, east asian, intellectual property, morrison 1998 pp, 1998 pp, morrison charles, property rights, economic cooperation, aggarwal vinod, intellectual property rights, apec york st, creation future apec, martin's pp, future apec york,
Approximate Word count = 3225
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)