At a technical level, it would be extremely difficult to establish such a grouping among such a diverse group of economies. Before taking even the first substantive step towards trade liberalization, allAPEC participants would need to negotiate, then ratify, a detailed and legally binding agreement to eliminate all border barriers to substantially all trade in goods and services among them according to an explicit timetable. It is difficult to envisage the US Congress. which will not even guarantee MFN treatment of China, agreeing to guarantee free trade with either China or Japan. Japan and several other East Asian governments are firmly opposed to any discriminatory form of regional economic co-operation. It is conceivable that all of these difficulties could be overcome in time, but any attempt to do so would delay substantive economic 2l co-operation across the Pacific by many years An even more fundamental problem is that discriminatory trading arrangements are swimming against the swelling tide of globalization of investment and production. Traditional FTAs require rules of origin at a time when the rapid growth of intra-industry and intra-firm trade is making it increasingly meaningless to seek to determine the geographic origin of products or the nationality of firms. It already takes almost 200 pages to set up arbitrary rules of origin for 'sensitive sectors in NAFTA, in order to seek to divert trade and investment in these sectors away from East Asia. It is quite unlikely that the enforcement of the complex web of market-distorting rules of origin, which would be required to fence off any preferential Asia Pacific trading arrangement. would be tolerated by the international private sector.