Trade: APEC’s demise paves the way for China’s free trade pact*

Remember APEC? This arrangement, Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation, to give its full title, was promoted as a major regional initiative by the Hawke-Keating Government in the late eighties. Ideological commitment to the notion of free trade as an end in itself tainted the project from the beginning, but it did limp on, mortally wounded, until the end of the nineties.Australia had put itself at the forefront of the experiment, in the misguided belief that some kind of regional free trade arrangem…

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