India and APEC: What It Means

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Should the U.S. back India's membership in Asia–Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)?  Walter Lohman and Derek Scissors, Ph.D. seem to think so.

For India to join, it must commit to APEC’s mission to “champion free and open trade and investment.” It must also be able to participate effectively. This means providing the required information concerning its own regulatory environment and working to harmonize it with the existing and future regulations introduced by other members. It may take several years for India to create the capacity to provide and absorb the information, but it would certainly not be the first member to suffer from institutional overload. The benefit to all APEC members of exercising patience with this process will be a much larger active economy with better-matched regulatory standards.

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