Best Practices

Hong Kong, China's (HKC) presentation focused on their multi-folded support measures to enhance the competitiveness of its SMEs for their greater participation in the Global Value Chains.  These measures included the promotion activities by the Hong Kong Trade and Development Council to enable SMEs to explore and connect with the global market; funding support to assist SMEs to upgrade their business and innovate; promoting research and development and their commercialisation; and providing infrastructure and other institutional support to facilitate the movement of goods across borders.

Aimed at helping develop or improve Trade Promotion Organisations’ services to better support women-led SMEs access global markets. Phase one of the project in 2014/15 identified the barriers women exporters face and developed a set of best practices and lessons that can be adapted to the individual circumstances of APEC economies. In 2016 and 2017, in phase two of the project, Australia is providing assistance to targeted economies to address economy specific barriers.

The project is identified as one of the existing efforts undertaken by APEC in promoting digital economy. Five O2O serial events held in Malaysia, Chinese Taipei, Viet Nam and the Philippines in 2017, expected to establish an expert network, formulate the APEC SME digital resilience training guidebook, enhance SMEs’ capabilities to seize digital opportunities and well prepare for the challenges via cross fora collaboration.

Initiative funded by Canada that intended to foster economic growth and reduce poverty in APEC developing economies by building the potential of MSMEs and aspiring entrepreneurs. The initiative has 2 components: C$2M APEC MSME Sub-Fund and C$2.49M for research and training project under the coordination of Asia Pacific Foundation. Asia Pacific Foundation collaborates with APEC in the following areas: (i) Sharing best practices, (ii) Finding common points on project collaboration, (iii) Highlighting new ideas to explore and expand, (iv) Identifying common interests and build on them, (vi) Extending and complimenting other projects with common goals.

The 4th APEC Business Ethics for SMEs Forum to be held in Hanoi, Viet Nam on 7-8 September 2017. The goals of the forum include: (i) specialized capacity building mentoring to ensure all economies have relevant industry codes in place by 2020, (ii) increase the number of member economies with public-private framework agreements to facilitate high-standard ethical business practices across national health systems, and (iii) strengthen ethical business practices for distributors and other third party intermediaries as vital enterprises in the medical device and biopharmaceutical sectors.

The report includes four case studies which evaluate the role of regulatory reforms in creating a proper business environment supporting SMEs: 1) dedicated agencies to assist SMEs with growth, development, compliance and internationalization; 2) agencies and institutions that specialize in supporting SME finance; 3) regulatory tiering; and 4) SME-friendly Regulatory Impact Assessments (RIA).

The 2015 APEC Business Advisory Council and USC Marshall School of Business report focused on engaging SMEs in cross-border e-commerce. They conducted first hand research across the 21 APEC economies to discover the enhancers and chokepoints unique to each economy. APEC and each member governments must focus to engage and support SMEs. An APEC wide framework addressing cross-border e-commerce is needed; sharing of best practices and pathfinder approaches is encouraged; and effort is required to help SMEs capacity build

Hong Kong, China's (HKC) sharing focused on their support for SMEs in the internet and digital economy.  Some of the measures included incubation programmes to nurture start-ups in the ICT field and mobile app business; opening up government and public data for entrepreneurship and making land available for the development of data centres; providing support and setting up dedicated institutions for assisting SMEs to upgrade, innovate and adopt technological solutions; and training and educating SMEs to increase their knowledge and know-how of the internet and digital economy.

Hong Kong, China's (HKC) sharing focused on their continuous efforts in driving the development of innovation and technology (I&T), with a focus on re-industrialisation.  By re-industrialisation, HKC aimed at applying I&T to manufacturing for developing high-end industries suitable for HKC and carrying out high value-added production processes.  To achieve this, a number of measures have been taken, including providing more space for industrialisation, assisting existing industries to move towards high value-added production, strengthening research and development, and providing financial assistance for upgrading and innovation.

The project is identified as one of the existing efforts undertaken by APEC in promoting digital economy. Five O2O serial events held in Malaysia, Chinese Taipei, Viet Nam and the Philippines in 2017, expected to establish an expert network, formulate the APEC SME digital resilience training guidebook, enhance SMEs’ capabilities to seize digital opportunities and well prepare for the challenges via cross fora collaboration.