The Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) forum was established as a regional grouping in 1989 to deal with the issues arising from growing regional interdependence. Its stated aim is to build ‘a prosperous Asia-Pacific through free and open trade and investment’ and it now has twenty-one member economies, including China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Chinese Taipei, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Russia, Canada, the USA, Mexico, Peru and Chile. The APEC Summit of Leaders and Ministers from around the region is the major dialogue on economic and political affairs across the Pacific each year. But APEC continues to evolve in a bid to keep pace with the rise of East Asian economic and political power, first around the emergence of Japan as a great industrial nation, later with the rise of the other East Asian economies, the remarkable growth of China and, more recently, the emergence of India.
