APEC 2023 Summit To Focus On Building ‘Resilient, Sustainable’ Economies

Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) officials said that the U.S. would focus on establishing more resilient and sustainable supply chains in hosting next year’s summit.

The theme will be “creating a resilient, sustainable future for all,” emphasizing the need for economies to be “interconnected, innovative and inclusive,” according to Mike Pyle, chairperson of the APEC 2023 Senior Officials’ Meeting recently held in Honolulu, Hawaii.

“One of the places that you see the conversation really zeroing in is around what it means to rebuild and make more resilient supply chains that connect the Asia-Pacific region,” Pyle added, who is also a U.S. Security Adviser for International Economics.

“Coming out of the pandemic where constraints to the supply chain are quite considerable, those strains have pretty dramatic ramifications for every economy in the Asia Pacific, every economy in the world,” he said.

Following the APEC 2022 in Bangkok, a leader declared in “very strong language in condemning Russia’s war, condemning the implications of Russia’s war in terms of pressure on the global economy,” Pyle said.

U.S. President Biden expressed he “wanted to rally the world to condemn in the strongest possible terms Russia’s immoral invasion of Ukraine and for the world to acknowledge the economic cost that Russia’s war is imposing on the rest of the world,” he said.

“He (Biden) wanted to speak to an affirmative agenda to address those concerns as well as to build a more sustainable, resilient economy for the world, particularly for emerging and developing economies,” he said.

“Those goals have been significantly advanced…we recognize that we are now starting on a strong foundation to really turn our attention to acting on and taking steps in the direction of delivering on the action plan that the President articulated last month,” Pyle added.

Senior Director of the APEC Secretariat in Singapore, Rebecca Sta. Maria said APEC officials talked with communities in the “past few days really helped us realize how will we translate all these big ideas into relevant initiatives to folks on the ground.”

“How do we make this really matter to the folks because we keep on saying that APEC’s initiatives are to benefit everybody, but how do we do that?” Sta. Maria said.

Source: ABS-CBN