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Canada and New Zealand announce private sector development agenda for APEC
November 18, 2005
NEWS RELEASE
Prime Minister Paul Martin today announced, with Prime Minister Helen Clark of New Zealand, a joint initiative to promote private sector development within Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC).
“Private sector development is essential to the prosperity of the Asia Pacific region and elsewhere,” said Prime Minister Martin. “I believe this initiative will contribute significantly to job creation and economic growth.”
The initiative will also allow APEC members to focus on the needs of small businesses by streamlining customs regulations and making them more transparent, by reducing business vulnerability to public sector corruption, and by helping governments consult with a broader range of stakeholders before they make policy.
Canada and New Zealand will set APEC’s private sector development agenda into motion by co-organizing, in Montreal in May 2006, an APEC Symposium on Enabling Private Sector Development. The event will take place on the margins of an APEC Business Advisory Council meeting, to make maximum use of the business community’s expertise in this area. The purpose of the symposium is to present current research on simplifying business regulations, share best practices among APEC members, and make recommendations to APEC for future private-sector development activities.
The APEC forum includes 21 economies from around the Pacific Rim. Its annual summits and regular working meetings feature discussions on trade, economic and security cooperation. The 13th APEC Leaders’ Meeting is taking place in Busan, South Korea, from November 18 to 19, 2005. The APEC Business Advisory Council is a forum of business leaders from around the region appointed by leaders of APEC members to provide advice on business concerns and priorities. It meets four times a year in locations across the Asia Pacific region.
Backgrounder
In addition to the May 2006 symposium in Montreal, Canada will also organize two events related to private-sector development on the margins of APEC meetings in Hanoi, Vietnam, in February 2006: a Symposium on Anti-Corruption and Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs), and a Training Course on Trade Policy Stakeholder Consultations. The anti-corruption symposium will highlight the disproportionate impact of corruption in developing countries on small businesses, which often operate outside the formal economy and lack the resources to defend their rights. It will also propose measures to help minimize this impact, such as land title registration, SME service centres, and transparent electronic procurement. The training course on trade policy consultations will encourage APEC members to include SME associations in their consultation processes.
Research by the World Bank and the UN Development Program shows that the development of a vibrant private sector is central to promoting growth and expanding opportunities for the poor, but that the legal and regulatory environment within which the private sector must function differs markedly among APEC members. For example, the number of steps required to open a business ranges from two to as many as 13, and the length of time required varies from two days to as many as 151 days. The average cost of collecting a debt ranges from 4.8 percent of the value of the debt to over 100 percent—making it counter-productive to use the legal system to enforce a contract in some jurisdictions.
More information about this research is available at www.undp.org/cpsd/ (the report of the UN Development Program’s Commission on the Private Sector & Development, led by Prime Minister Martin and former president of Mexico Ernesto Zedillo), and at www.doingbusiness.org. The development chapter of Canada’s International Policy Statement is available at www.acdi-cida.gc.ca/ips-development, under “A more strategic focus.”
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