Singapore Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, who met several world leaders, including Chinese President Xi Jinping and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit 2024 in the South American nation of Peru, has said that Singapore is ready to host the global meet in 2030.
APEC Peru 2024 was held from 15 to 16 November 2024, and PM Wong offered to host the 2030 meeting at the closing of this year’s summit. This international forum has 21 member economies, which collectively account for almost half of all global trade and commerce.
Some of the major member economies in APEC are the United States of America, Canada, China, Russia, Japan, Republic of Korea (aka South Korea), Singapore, and Australia.
“Singapore regards this as an important grouping, not just for trade and investment, because APEC also serves as an incubator for ideas around other areas of cooperation, like supply chains, digital economy and sustainability,” PM Wong was quoted as saying in a CNA report today.
Speaking to the media in Peru yesterday, the Singapore prime minister said, “We have offered to host the APEC Summit in 2030.”
A country can host the APEC Summit multiple times — Singapore did so in 2009, when Lee Hsien Loong was the prime minister; and Peru hosted it twice earlier, in 2008 and 2016.
Waning support for globalisation and trade
In his interaction with the media at APEC Peru this year, the Singapore prime minister said that there was “widespread recognition” at the summit that “powerful forces” would be actively “shaping the trajectory of events” in the near future.
One of the aspects of the current globalised economy was that people in many countries felt they were losing out on economic benefits — therefore, “there is, across the board, a concern that support for globalisation and trade is weakening”, said PM Wong.
The solution to this problem is not to raise protective walls around national economies. Referring to the disenchantment with globalisation among sections of people in various nations, PM Wong said, “Of course, [the question is] what can we do about this? One response would be to simply put up more barriers, but it is good that the APEC economies across the board reject that response, and feel that the right way to go about dealing with these concerns is to double down on our trade and investment links, make sure that trade works for the benefit of all our peoples, and find ways to make growth more inclusive.”
However, even with stronger linkages, every country’s “domestic circumstances” were not the same and so the pace would also not be the same, he added.
Giving the example of climate change and the economic measures needed to attain the goal of Net Zero, the Singapore leader said, “The starting point to fight global warming and to tackle climate change is to put a price on carbon and phase out subsidies to fossil fuels. But not everyone is able to make that move. Each one will move at their own pace, because there are domestic considerations, political sensitivities and so on.”
As a result, some APEC nations may have to group together and move ahead, while others try to find their own way through their specific circumstances.
“We recognise that not everyone can move in tandem, and so we will try to gather like-minded economies to move first,” said PM Wong.
In this context, he mentioned the “P4” agreement (Brunei, Singapore, Chile, and New Zealand), which led to the CPTPP (Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership), and the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement. PM Wong described these smaller but more open APEC economies as “pathfinders”.
