The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) is widely known for that perfect Kodak moment when leaders of some of the world's most powerful economies unanimously donned on a traditional attire and posed for the camera.

But academics said the club, which groups 21 Pacific rim economies including China, the United States, Japan and Russia, has played an instrumental role in bringing the region together in the past 20 years, even though it was, in some sense, an occasion for leaders to just meet and talk at ease.

"You can actually meet each other in very informal circumstances in a way that would be difficult otherwise," said Wang Gungwu, Chairman of the Singapore-based East Asian Institute." The APEC does not have specific goals but it provides a forum where lots of views can be shared and then people learn to understand each other."

"Economy has always been the focus. There is no tension about politics and military problems," he said.

At its inception, the APEC was just a loose consultative forum when ministers from 12 member economies met for the first time in Australia in the winter of 1989, according to a book launched Tuesday to mark the group's 20th anniversary. It gained remarkable significance in 1993 when then US President Bill Clinton invited the region's leaders to the Blake Island, Seattle for the group's first ever leaders' summit.

President of the US-based East-West Center Charles Morrison said the meeting was actually the first ever among American, Chinese and Japanese leaders back then. The APEC was the institution established right after the end of the Cold War when the three Asia-Pacific powers rarely interacted with each other due to political and ideological differences.

"It was a time when there were minimum regional cooperation, little regional engagement in the global issues, and full of uncertainties," Morrison told Xinhua on the sidelines of an APEC achievement symposium. "Without the APEC, it would take much longer before the region can become as open and integrated as today."

In 1994, APEC economic leaders endorsed an ambitious vision to achieve free and open trade in the region -- industrialized members by 2010 and developing members by 2020. Since then, annual intra-APEC merchandise trade grew almost five times to US$8.44 trillion in 2007 -- with an average increase of 8.5 percent per year, compared to the world's average of 7.6 percent.

In a report released Monday, the APEC Secretariat said the group's membership is comparable to being part of a free trade agreement, despite that the APEC does not set binding treaties among its members and all commitments are made on the voluntary basis.

But over the past decade, the group's influence has somewhat dwindled, notably after the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis, said Benito Lim, political science professor at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines.

"It (APEC) was Australia's idea but it was the US who made it work," Lim told Xinhua in a phone interview. "So when Southeast Asian nations asked Washington for help but was rejected outright, the group lost its momentum."

Lim said even though the forum remains as a key avenue for the US president to engage with his Southeast Asian counterparts, the APEC seems to have been marginalized because of its non-binding nature and the increased coordination among the world's leaders on occasions such as the G-20 summit.

"There is a lot of rethinking about how the APEC can develop to relate more to the G-20 process," Morrison said, adding that the APEC ideally would be a place for Asia-Pacific powers to consult with each other on the global agenda and the nine APEC members who are also G-20 members can bring the region's thinking to the global venue.

At this year's APEC summit, to be held over the weekend, US President Barack Obama, China's Hu Jintao, Japan's Yukio Hatoyama and other regional leaders are expected to declare support for a global trade deal in 2010 and to vow for concerted efforts to fight global warming.

"We are concerned that the high level political commitment to concluding the Doha Round -- also named the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) -- has yet to be translated into substantive progress in the negotiations. We are ready to exercise all possible flexibility in order to accelerate the pace in negotiations," a draft of the meeting's declaration seen by Xinhua said.

"We instruct our Ministers to work closely with the WTO Director-General to evaluate, in specific terms, what needs to be done to conclude the DDA in 2010," the draft said.

The talks, launched by the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 with an aim to help poor nations prosper in the global trade, have been stalled for more than a year over wide disparity among developed and developing nations over farm products trade.

"A Doha agreement will give real substance to the APEC and makes its 20th anniversary something that will never be forgotten," said Carla Hills, Chair and Chief Executive Officer of Hills and Company International Consultants.

(Xinhua News Agency November 11, 2009)