Authors: Malcolm Bosworth and Greg Cutbush, ANU Enterprise

Like all good fairytales, APEC was formed ‘once upon a time’ to promote trade and investment in the Asia Pacific.

Members like Australia, New Zealand and Japan fought hard to ensure it would not become a myopic trade bloc that discriminated against and sought to divert economic activity away from others. Read more…

Authors: Malcolm Bosworth and Greg Cutbush, ANU Enterprise

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her Government’s ‘Trading Our Way to Prosperity’ statement (in response to the Productivity Commission’s Report on Bilateral and Regional Trade Arrangements) is commendable.

It rejected Australia’s regrettable preoccupation with preferential trade agreements (PTAs), and heeded the Productivity Commission’s advice that trade policy should be reviewed against the ‘principles of unilateralism, non-discrimination, transparency’, and ‘the grand unifying principle of trade policy as an indivisible part of overall economic reform’. Read more…