REPORT
APEC 2016 Leaders’ Declaration and Malaysian Engineering Services
By Lee Soo Leng
Malaysia as a trading nation has been active in the formation of the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement( TPPA) over the past years. The TPP is a free trade initiative which involves the APEC economies of Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, Vietnam and Japan. However, with the recent turn of events, after President Donald Trump of the United States took office, the fate of TPPA remains uncertain.
Against this backdrop, the recent Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation( APEC) 2016 Leaders’ Declaration on November 20, 2016 in Lima, Peru is worth revisiting to understand its impact on the regional economy and in particular, the opportunities for the engineering fraternity.
APEC is a forum for 21 Pacific Rim member economies that promotes free trade throughout the Asia-Pacific region. APEC has long been at the forefront of reform efforts in the area of business facilitation.
In view of the TPPA uncertainty, Malaysian International Trade and Industry Minister who led the
Malaysian delegation to the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, from Jan 17-20, 2017 mentioned that Malaysia may look into the possibility of pursuing bilateral free trade agreements( FTAs) with TPP members. He further added that Malaysia has been a major beneficiary of foreign direct investment, which has contributed to the country’ s exports given that a large number of foreign companies operating in Malaysia are 100 % export-oriented. The presence of foreign companies in exchange of know-how is crucial in developing their capabilities to allow them to be part of the global supply chain.
With the above scenario, it may be important to take a look at some of the salient points concluded at the recent APEC 2016 Leaders’ Declaration on the direction of free trade, with particular focus on engineering services related areas.
The extract of the APEC 2016 Leaders’ Declaration is as follows:
We, the Leaders of APEC, met in Lima under the theme of Quality Growth and Human Development to continue working on our common endeavour to support free and open trade
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