The Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) forum was established as a regional grouping in 1989 to deal with the issues arising from growing regional interdependence. Its stated aim is to build 'a prosperous Asia-Pacific through free and open trade and investment' and it now has twenty-one member economies, including China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Chinese Taipei, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Russia, Canada, the USA, Mexico, Peru and Chile. The APEC Summit of Leaders and Ministers from around the region is the major dialogue on economic and political affairs across the Pacific each year. But APEC continues to evolve in a bid to keep pace with the rise of East Asian economic and political power, first around the emergence of Japan as a great industrial nation, later with the rise of the other East Asian economies, the remarkable growth of China and, more recently, the emergence of India.

This new Major Work from Routledge is a five-volume collection which covers in depth the origins and history of APEC, its achievements and the impact it has had-and continues to have-on international relations and economic cooperation in general. It provides the information, analysis and interpretation that are essential to thinking about the economic and political framework within which these unprecedented changes in the structure of the world economy might be managed more or less successfully.