The emphasis on the international trading system was also welcome. Adherence to the proposed ‘standstill’ on protectionist measures will be patchy: the United States is likely to accompany Australia in giving sizeable subsidies to car-makers threatened by international competition. But there is much lower risk of a widespread resort to beggar-thy-neighbour trade policies. Trade Ministers may not obey the instruction to resolve the outstanding problems of the WTO Doha negotiations by the end of the year. But there is much less likelihood of the Doha Round being abandoned.

The G 20 summit is just beginning of a process. The achievements of the meeting were based on the work the G 20 Finance Ministers in Brazil. That made it possible to accompany a communiqué with agreed, and substantial, immediate and medium-term action plans. The communiqué also foreshadowed a wider agenda to address energy security and climate change, food security, the rule of law, and the fight against terrorism, poverty and disease. In due course, it can become a forum for considering general strategic and security issues, pending the reform of the United Nations Security Council.

An urgent task for the next G 20 summit will be to prepare for the 2009 Copenhagen meeting on climate change. A mandate from these leaders on the general principles for equitable sharing of the burden of stabilise the proportion of GHGs in the atmosphere is the only hope of securing a successful outcome from Copenhagen.

While the Doha Round is being completed, the G 20 could turn its attention to the wider issue of promoting global economic integration. The scope of this challenge has moved well beyond negotiation of binding commitments on border barriers to trade in goods and services. At present, new issues are being addressed within hundreds, potentially thousands, of poorly coordinated discriminatory agreements among pairs or small groups of economies. There has to be a better way.

The many who have helped to nurture the APEC process can take some pride in the nature of the new G 20. Like APEC summits, the meeting was based on careful preparation by officials and Ministers. Moreover, leaders and Ministers accept responsibility for oversight of ongoing work to meet agreed objectives. Meetings of Ministers in charge of other aspects of the envisaged agenda are likely. And it is welcome to see, in the communiqué, that there is no presumption of ‘one-size fits all’. Governments are expected to tailor actions to individual circumstances, but with regard for the interests of others. It is also significant that, as in the APEC process, capacity-building is accepted as an integral part of promoting shared objectives.

It is naïve to think that G20 is intended to, or could, subsume regional cooperation processes like APEC. APEC and other regional groupings will continue to provide a key input into this new and other global forums. The emergence of the G 20 has implications for the APEC agenda, however, in line with the comparative advantage of different forums. APEC will no longer be expected to attend to international financial crises which need a global response. It leaves APEC free to pursue its basic objective of helping its member economies to realise their potential for sustainable growth, primarily by enhancing their capacity to design and implement more efficient domestic policies, based on the experience of others then adapted to individual circumstances. If the G 20 is willing to take joint leadership of the WTO process, APEC will be freer to focus on its pioneering work on trade facilitation as a step towards promoting global, not just regional, economic integration.