Funding for projects is made possible by contributions from APEC members. Four core committees and their respective working groups provide strategic policy recommendations to APEC Leaders and Ministers who annually set the vision for overarching goals and initiatives.
APEC's structure is based on both a "bottom-up" and "top-down" approach. Work is underway within APEC on the complementary work programmes in each sector in areas such as trade facilitation and capacity building. We provide coordination, technical, advisory support to the Chair and the or so meetings of different APEC working groups and other fora held annually; we maintain a huge database of information on APEC activities with a website that attracts somehits a month; we assist member economies in formulating APEC's economic and technical cooperation projects and we manage their finances, some projects in total currently.
But, though real risks remain, there are growing grounds for optimism about the regional economic outlook. The working groups are headed by experts and consider specific issues, including energy, tourism, fishing, transportation, and telecommunications. They also laid down the basis on which it should go forward by measures of trade and investment liberalisation, of business facilitation and economic and technical cooperation or ecotech.