The Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, which set out to achieve "free and open trade and investment in the region" and led highly significant liberalization initiatives in the 1990s, has been stagnating for the past decade. The main cause of APEC's marginalization was clearly the...

An essential pillar of a US strategy toward East Asian integration is acceptance of the legitimacy and desirability of that process. US acceptance of the economic integration of Europe is the model. Further, the United States--as well as Canada and Mexico--should seek to nest any new...

C. Fred Bergsten The decision by the House of Representatives on April 10 to change the rules for Congressional action on trade agreements drives a gaping hole in US trade policy and poses the gravest threat to the global trading system in decades. By rejecting long-settled procedures that...

The mission of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC)--created in 1969 through an amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act--is "to mobilize and facilitate the participation of United States private capital and skills in the economic and social development of less developed countries...

At their latest annual summit in Vietnam in November 2006, the leaders of the 21 members of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum agreed to "seriously consider" negotiating a Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP). The FTAAP initiative may well turn out to be the best, or...

The economic and financial problems in the euro area are clearly serious and plentiful. An increasing number of commentators and economists have begun to question whether the euro can survive. There are only two alternatives. Europe can jettison the monetary union or it can adopt a complementary...

The initial postwar challenge from East Asia was economic. Japan crashed back into global markets in the 1960s, became the largest surplus and creditor country in the 1980s, and was viewed by many as the world’s dominant economy by 1990. The newly industrialized countries (Korea, Taiwan, Hong...