THE 17th APEC ECONOMIC LEADERS’ MEETING SUSTAINING GROWTH, CONNECTING THE REGION”

We, the Leaders of APEC, gathered in Singapore and marked twenty years of cooperation in promoting economic growth and prosperity for our people. In line with new trends and emerging challenges, our agenda has grown in breadth, depth, and complexity. But our common goal remains the same – to support growth and prosperity in the Asia-Pacific region, through free and open trade and investment, as embedded in the Bogor Goals.

Accelerating Regional Economic Integration

We will accelerate our work to strengthen REI in the Asia-Pacific, taking a comprehensive approach that focuses our work on trade liberalisation “at the border”; improving the business environment “behind the border”; and enhancing supply chain connectivity “across the border”.

We instruct officials to intensify our work on initiatives to promote greater convergences among economies in key areas of APEC’s REI agenda, including in services, the digital economy, investment, trade facilitation, rules of origin and standards/technical barriers to trade.

We welcome the participation of Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Singapore,
and the United States in a pathfinder initiative under which economies will agree to practice self-certification of origin with FTA partners. This initiative will facilitate trade by cutting the certification procedure down to a single step and reducing processing time to just one day.

We endorse the APEC Principles for Cross-Border Trade in Services and the APEC Services Action Plan, which together will provide a foundation for APEC’s future work to promote services trade and build greater convergences among APEC economies in their treatment of services.

We aspire to achieve an APEC-wide improvement of 25 percent in five key areas of doing business by 2015: Starting a Business, Getting Credit, Enforcing Contracts, Trading Across Borders and Dealing with Permits, and a 5 percent improvement by 2011. We welcome the preparation of capacity building work programmes by champion economies – United States; New Zealand; Japan; Korea; Hong Kong, China; and Singapore – and encourage continuous and concerted efforts through the Ease of Doing Business Action Plan to make it cheaper, faster and easier to do business in the Asia-Pacific.

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