APEC Trade Ministers Act to Boost Vaccine Production

PECC co-chairs Dr Richard Cantor and Ambassador Zhan Yongxin represented the Council at the APEC Ministers Responsible for Trade meeting. During the meeting Dr Cantor spoke on behalf of the co-chairs noting that “Last month we met with our PECC executive committee to discuss developments in the region, and there was an unambiguous message from our members that the economic recovery remains fragile with several economies in our region suffering from 2nd or 3rd waves of infections.”

Dr Cantor continued to say that “the region’s most urgent priority is to cooperate on vaccinating as many people as we can, as quickly and as equitably as we can because this will ultimately facilitate the movement of people and the opening of our economies.”

PECC has five recommendations to address the COVID-19 pandemic:

1. We call on APEC to adopt practical measures to ensure the accessibility and affordability of COVID-19 vaccines in all economies.
2. While manufacturing capacity for COVID-19 vaccines ha...

MXCPEC Webinar: Gender Inclusion and Women's Empowerment in APEC

In the XXIst Century, women participation in the economy has been recognized as an indispensable condition to potentiate the development of economies. In the APEC region, notwithstanding that there had been advancements in the empowerement of women, still there are significant gender gaps in public policies and structural barriers that limit women’s development that the COVID-19 pandemic has made even worse.

The Mexico Member Committee of the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council (MXCPEC) has as one of its main objectives to contribute with other Fora to deepen the study of the complex themes regarding women inclusion and empowerment and to socialize this knowledge through online seminars with specialists in such topics to further the understanding on women’s role nowadays and to inform public policies for them to enhance the potential of women.

The current Webinar objective is to address those issues by gathering five outstanding academics from Australia, Japan, Phillipines, Mexico...

27th PECC GENERAL MEETING CONCLUDES

The 27th PECC General Meeting concluded on 17 December 2020. The event was hosted by the Malaysian National Committee for Pacific Economic Cooperation (MANCPEC) on the theme of “Optimizing Human Potential Towards Future of Shared Prosperity and Sustainability in Times of Covid-19.” Ambassador Don Campbell, international co-chair of PECC said that how we respond to the Covid-19 crisis was a defining moment of our age. While we were in a moment of danger, we were also in a moment of opportunity to address issues that we had thus far failed to address – such as sustainability and inequality.

Mr. Herizal Hazri, Chief Executive, Institute of Strategic and International Studies (ISIS), and Chair, Malaysia National Committee for Pacific Economic Cooperation reflecting on the discussions over the course of the General Meeting said that it is clear that there we have many challenges facing us due to Covid-19, but it is also clear that many of these questions have been with us for decades – how...

APEC CSOM 2020 - Briefing on PECC perspectives on the development of the post-2020 APEC Vision

On behalf of the PECC co-chairs, Ambassador Don Campbell briefed the APEC Concluding Senior Officials Meeting on PECC perspectives on the development of the post-2020 APEC Vision. He noted that PECC had worked closely with APEC officials in the development of the post-2020 vision organizing a number Multistakeholder Dialogues with APEC since the process began back in 2016.

He emphasized the need for the post-2020 to address some of the longer term issues facing the region including the urgent question of income inequality, essential questions of climate change and while rapid technological change did have the potential to enhance prosperity it also has the ability to increase the tendency towards fragmentation.

He noted that there are issues on which APEC can make a difference, including its support for the multilateral trading system, ways to progress regional economic integration and finding ways to address the fragmentation of the digital economy in the months ahead. He emphasized...

State of the Region 2020

The economic outlook for the Asia-Pacific has improved somewhat in recent months, but recovery will be uneven and fragile as the global pandemic has deepened in some places. Asia-Pacific economies are expected to shrink by about 3.1 percent in 2020 – less than the 4.7 percent contraction forecast in July’s State of the Region Report: Impact of the Covid-19 Crisis. Growth of 5 percent is now expected next year. Growth in the Asia-Pacific is then expected to decline towards 3.5% in subsequent years.

The reasons for the improved 2020 picture are China’s return to growth (it reported 4.9 percent expansion for the third quarter) and the less severe-than-expected downturns in several advanced economies. However, achieving significant and sustainable gains is contingent on reduced global volatility and on multilateral cooperation – which has been sorely lacking - to contain the global pandemic.

While the regional economy is coming out of the depths it fell to in the first half of 2020, th...