Text: Under Secretary Larson Nov. 14 Remarks on APEC Ministerial
(Ministers call for WTO ad hoc group on electronic commerce)Participants at the November, 2000 APEC Ministerial Meeting in Brunei came out in support of a U.S.-sponsored initiative calling for a World Trade Organization (WTO) ad hoc group on electronic commerce, says U.S. Under Secretary of State Alan Larson.
"It was a very useful, productive meeting," Larson told reporters at a November 14 press briefing on the APEC meeting in Bandar Seri Bagawan, Brunei Darussalam.
The APEC Ministerial Meeting "reflects the fact that there is a great deal of important technical cooperation in a wide range of areas," he said.
Larson added that the APEC economies, through such cooperation, continue to "play the leading role" in being "the vanguard of globalization."
Following is the text of Larson's remarks:
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Under Secretary of State Alan Larson
Remarks to the Press on the APEC Ministerial Meeting
Bandar Seri Bagawan, Brunei Darussalam
November 14, 2000We felt that the APEC Ministerial was a very successful meeting. It might be worth -- just at the beginning -- saying a little bit about the importance of APEC.
This is a grouping of countries that are really quite diverse in terms of their level of development, in terms of their political structures, and many of their cultural traditions, but they have brought themselves together in pursuit of a number of common objectives including liberalization of trade and investment flows among themselves and in the broader global economy and in specific practical steps to provide technical assistance to each other in addressing some of the issues that economies face as they cope with the opportunities but also the stresses of globalization.
For the United States, our total trade with APEC countries is 1.1 trillion dollars, two thirds of our total trade. We are very cognizant of the role that APEC has played in promoting global trade liberalization.
I think the Blake Island meeting that President Clinton called in 1993 was an important stimulus to the completion of the Uruguay Round. The APEC countries played an absolutely crucial role in catalyzing the information technology agreement, and just at this meeting APEC is catalyzing a call for a WTO ad hoc group on electronic commerce. This year the APEC economies also made a strong call for the launch of global trade negotiations -- a new round of negotiations.
A second major topic beyond trade for this particular meeting was the whole issue of the new economy. There are roughly 250 million Internet users among the APEC economies and this is growing. In some of the APEC economies Internet usage is over 40 percent -- certainly the United States, Canada and Australia and I think also Singapore and Korea.
In other economies it's much, much lower, but even in many of those economies it's growing very quickly. So this to us seems like a region that is poised to take advantage of the opportunities of the new economy, and the work program that is being laid out both at the ministerial -- and I think will be discussed further at the leader's meeting -- is one that is designed to ensure that this region really does seize the benefits of the new economy, of information technology and electronic commerce.
One of the things that is unique about APEC is this mix of liberalization and technical cooperation. In the area of the new economy, the United States has been pushing both of those strands. In our statements, Secretary of Commerce Mineta and U.S. Trade Representative Ambassador Barshefsky and I all made statements about how APEC economies can move forward in the new economy.
One of the things we talked about was the importance of partnerships in helping economies that have already done e-commerce readiness assessments, to move from the assessment stage to the question of addressing and correcting any shortcomings in their readiness. That was an initiative of the United States, and it's been accepted.
We also stressed that it is important, when thinking about the new economy, to think not only of the Internet and of the technical side of it but also the economic side. If you talk about the new economy you have to examine what is new about it.
One of the new things, to be sure, is new technology. But what is also new is the importance of new firms. In our own economy, many of the firms that are very important in the new economy hardly existed ten years ago, so you have to have a system that facilitates the creation of new firms.
Another thing that's new is the new forms of financing these firms; it is interesting that there's been a lot of discussion at this meeting about venture capital and providing access to capital for firms that have great ideas but not a lot of assets. That is also an important part of the new economy.
Our delegation spent quite a bit of time talking about the social side of growth policies, because we believe it is important that the economies in the region have social safety nets and that there be attention to problems like infectious diseases. We mentioned our willingness to cooperate with economies in the region to do surveillance on infectious diseases to make sure that some of these infectious diseases that have gotten so far out of hand in other parts of the world to the point that they have devastated the whole economy and the whole country not reach those proportions here. That is just another example of the technical cooperation that exists within APEC.
There is also technical cooperation in areas like child labor. It was very interesting to see that the government of Thailand reported on the conference it had held on the subject of the worst forms of child labor and the relationship between that and basic education; that is, the more you can keep kids in basic education in their younger years, the more you improve the human capacity of the economy, and the more you avoid problems like child labor.
We had an excellent discussion of biotechnology. There was, I think, broad agreement that this is something that's very important for the global economy and for addressing the problem of world hunger. It was agreed that it was important that the food safety systems be science-based and that there be rational systems for risk analysis in assessing both the opportunities and benefits as well as any risks that might be posed by new types of foods.
Our delegation -- and our business delegation also -- made a very strong pitch in support of a program that is going to be pursued over the course of this next year to promote rural development, so that you have more balanced development between the urban centers and the rural country side. This is something that will have a great deal of business support.
Finally, I think there was a very useful discussion of the oil market at this meeting and that's reflected in the communiqu¡¦ It calls for cooperation within APEC to exchange information and help each other with programs to use energy more efficiently, to develop alternatives to imported oil, and to develop oil safety stocks that can help cushion economies against the worse effects of actual interruptions in oil supplies.
So to sum up, it was a very useful, productive meeting -- and it reflects the fact that there is a great deal of important technical cooperation in a wide range of areas, all of which are designed to help these economies continue to play the leading role that they are playing in really being on the vanguard of globalization.
Just one last statistic that I find very revealing -- the APEC economies as a whole are economies where the value of trade represents 37 percent of their GNP. These are economies that are really integrated into the global trading system, and that 37 percent is up from 24 percent in 1989. So over the last decade the APEC economies as a whole have really become much more integrated in the global economy, and I think it would be hard to find a grouping of countries that has anything approaching this degree of involvement in the global economy and I think that helps explain why the APEC countries play such a leadership role.
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(Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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