APEC

This past week Sydney hosted the APEC summit. It stands for Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation and brings together the leaders of 21 countries from the area; including the United States, China and Russia. The summit lasted for the whole week with meetings among business leaders and ministers, and ended with the Leader´s Meeting over the weekend. Sydney was quite messed up during the week: Many areas in the city centre were closed from public, police ran searches and there were special arrangements for public transportation. Citizens were even advised to avoid any unnecessary visits to the city centre and Friday was public holiday. APEC was the highest level security operation ever conducted in Australia (even higher than the 2000 Olympics), mostly due to fears of violent protests against the summit and especially against George Bush. There were quite many protests, including students marching on Wednesday, but they all were considerably peaceful.

The main issues discussed in APEC were climate change, trade agreements, economic development and security. John Howard (the prime minister of Australia) actually succeeded in hailing a climate change agreement including the world´s major polluters, China and the US. The commitment has been strongly criticised because of lack of specific binding targets, though. It basically states that long-term aspirational goals for post-Kyoto time are needed. It´s going to be interesting if they´ll actually come up with something more concrete at the UN conference in December. Another major topic was coming in terms with multilateral trade agreements, but the conclusion was only stating the importance of support for the Doha Round. In my opinion the summit was mostly succesful in strenghtening political and economic relations between individual nations. For example, Australia made a deal to export notable amounts of uranium to Russia.

All in all, it has been interesting following the news and decisions made during APEC. I´m still in the process of reading todays newspapers about all the talks and agreements that took place during the meetings. And in general, during this year I´ve learned quite a lot about the politics and especially economics within the Asia-Pacific area. Since Australia mainly trades with the US and increasingly with China, Japan and India, the media mainly covers those areas and the issues are brought up at our lectures, too. It has raised my interest towards Asia, both in terms of business and cultures, and if I ever get the opportunity to work anywhere within the Asia-Pacific area I´ll be more than happy to accept it! That´s one of the reasons why I´m doing a stop-over in Hong Kong on my way back home; to get a feeling of the city to see if I´d like to live there sometimes in the future.

Now that I got to the topic, I´m so excited about all the opportunities future has to offer me! After graduating I can work basically anywhere in the world and for any interesting company, trying to pursue my goals of having a succesful international career. I´m already looking forward to all the challenges and new experiences, and to be honest I also wanna earn some money. I know I can´t be too selective about my first jobs, but if I got to choose I´d like to work among marketing environmental products/services. The trend towards consumers demanding enviromentally friendly options is increasing pretty much everywhere, which I see as positive development. So hopefully that will open some good job opportunities for me within the field I´m most interested in. But before anything else I gotta graduate, which reminds me of the two mid-term exams coming up this and next week...

Jamie, Sharon, Moy, Cameron, Carlos and I in a cocktail bar