At the same time, the diversity of cultural backgrounds. levels of technological capacity, forms of government and legal systems, underlain by historical legacies of colonialism and recent military conflicts, can make co- operation difficult. The challenge for the APEC process, as regional governments begin to implement the Bogor Declarations goal of free and open trade and investment, is to find a workable compromise between different approaches to economic co-operation. The process also needs to anticipate further rapid changes in the economic “weights” of participants. The structure of APEC will need to be very flexible to accommodate the continuing decline in the relative influence of the USA in the Asia Pacific as well as the rapidly increasing strength of the Chinese and South East Asian economies compared to both Japan and the USA.