Word: australianness
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...Singapore, describes as "rather dry." So far the organization has focused on reducing red tape, tariffs and other barriers between borders. It now wants to move behind borders, helping members harmonize their approach to business competition and regulation, product standards and corporate governance. A recent study at the Australian National University's College of Asia and the Pacific estimated that fully implementing such reforms would add over $100 billion a year to APEC's collective income. Structural reform "won't get banner headlines," says Heseltine, "but it is immensely important...
...That pretty much sums up APEC, which, as Australian Prime Minister John Howard likes to say, does its best work "under the radar." As a club based on informal cooperation, APEC doesn't set rules or impose targets. Instead, it promotes free-market values and offers practical help in implementing them. "It builds a climate in which trade liberalization is seen as the right direction," says Heseltine. "To resile from that, to move backward, actually becomes very hard." For a quick measure of APEC's effectiveness, says Oxley, contrast Vietnam and Venezuela. Vietnam, embracing APEC's open-market model...
...developing nations, with mushrooming emissions and, under Kyoto, no obligation to limit them. "If we could get all 21 economies to agree to make some kind of a contribution to address the issue," Downer says, "it would be a very big step forward." Alan Oxley, chairman of the Australian APEC Study Center at Monash University, agrees. "The Chinese will not accept the sort of regulation Kyoto proposes," he says. "But they are showing increasing interest in the AP6 model. So there's a significant opportunity for APEC to influence the global regime." The outcome, he says, could be a multitrack...
...Critics say APEC's successes are vague and its influence fading. Former Australian P.M. Paul Keating, who helped convene the first leaders' summit in 1993, has slammed APEC as "a talk shop of debatable output." The region has other forums, notably the 16-member East Asian Summit. But, says HSBC's Edwards, only APEC "includes both China and the U.S. and all the economies that have most to lose if their relationship broke down. There are all sorts of points of tension between the two that can be modulated by the diplomacy of the others." With many members allied with...
...Another, possibly key, point is that NDEs vary across cultures. In a soon-to-be-published review of the literature, a team of Australian researchers reports, for example, that Chinese NDEs are dominated by feelings of bodily estrangement without all the pleasant stuff, and that the Japanese see caves rather than tunnels. For co-author Mahendra Perera, a Melbourne psychiatrist, these differences don't prove that NDEs are hallucinations, only that their "final expression is colored by culture, language and learning...