Elizaveta A. Safonkina - Researcher at the Research Center for International Development Assistance of the International Organisations Research Institute, National Research University Higher School of Economics; 20 Myasnitskaya, 10100, Moscow, Russia; E-mail: esafonkina@hse.ru

The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC) is one of the key platforms of the multilateral dialogue on global agenda issues in the Asia-Pacific region. Notwithstanding its regional character, the annual APEC leaders` summits significance is comparable with that of the key global governance institutions, such as the G8 and G20, summits. With increasing integration and enhanced economic relationships as well as established interaction pattern the APEC influence on regional and global economic agenda is growing. In spite of the fact that APEC initially positioned itself as a “free group of economics” not a political association, the member states step-by-step turn to the most acute worldwide political issues, which is reflected in the leaders` statements made during the summit. The analysis of the APEC 2013 summit which was held within the Indonesian presidency on 7-8 October 2013 on Bali provides an insight into the main drivers of the APEC agenda. Given that currently all countries face similar economic and social challenges: low and stalling economic growth, need to pursue fiscal consolidation, persistent structural unemployment, widening income disparities, base erosion and profit shifting as well as tax evasion, climate change negative consequences etc, it`s useful to analyze the measures implemented at the regional level (APEC), as well as the global level (G20). A comparison with the G20 is largely determined shared challenges and by the intersecting memberships: almost half of the members of the institutions participate in both fora, namely Australia, Canada, China, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Republic of Korea, Russia and the United States. The recent APEC and G20 agendas aim to coordinate actions to resolve the shared problems and move towards new growth models. The analysis is based on the key summit documents - Bali Declaration “Resilient Asia-Pacific, Engine of Global Growth”, Joint Ministerial Statement, leaders` statements and accompanying documents. The analysis permits to identify the vector of APEC agenda development.