Limits to persuasion ?
Voluntary co-operation will not work for proposals where the costs of adjustment continue to outweigh the expected benefits. If such perceptions persist as 2010 and 2020 loom closer, then APEC governments will need to consider entering into negotiations to resolve some outstanding issues, than to ratify a binding agreement to implement the outcome of these negotiations
They will then need to consider whether to allow some aspects of the APEC process to lead to binding, as against voluntary commitments, or to conduct the negotiations needed to meet the outstanding issues in some other forum.
These issues may need to be confronted as early as 2005, as the first deadline of 2010 approaches. By then, the trust among APEC participants may have increased sufficiently to negotiate a formal "package" among themselves to deal with some of the contentlous issues which remain to be taken to meet their 1994 Bogor commitments. But great care will need to be taken to avoid damaging the patten of voluntary co-operation among Asia Pacific economies to deal with other opportunities to facilitate internationnal economic transaction in the region which are perccived to be positive-sum games.
It would be perverse to upset a pattern of effective voluntary co-operation to take advantage of continuous new opportunities for promoting mutually