Members of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum have taken measures to accelerate progress on goals of reducing business transaction costs by 5 percent by 2006, the APEC Committee on Trade and Investment (CTI) announced Thursday.

The reduction is expected to stimulate an additional 280 billion US dollars in annual trade, said CTI Chair Ng Kim Neo at a press conference held on the sidelines of the APEC annual meetings.

"All APEC member economies have selected the actions and measures that they will use to facilitate trade in the region and reduce costs to business," said Ng, adding that some economies have provided detailed information on their intended reforms, including prospective cost reductions to business.

"For example, Singapore demonstrated a 75 percent cost saving to business from the development of TradeNet, a one-stop system for processing permit applications for exports from and imports into Singapore," she said.

The CTI is responsible for working on APEC's twin objectives of creating a coherent APEC perspective and voice on global trade and investment issues, and increasing cooperation among members on key trade and investment liberalization and facilitation goals.

"CTI fora are also actively pursuing trade facilitation strategies. For example, the business mobility group is implementing measures to streamline and accelerate the processing of visas," said Ng.

She mentioned that another central issue for the committee has been APEC's efforts to accelerate the implementation of a strategic plan to provide member economies with access to capacity building support and know-how to actively participate in the World Trade Organization (WTO) process and benefit from the multilateral system.

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