The University of Colima boasts Pacific Basin and APEC Study Centers. Courtesy University of Colima

Perched on the edge of Mexico facing the vast Pacific Ocean, the State of Colima is ideally placed to fulfill the Pacific "vocation" that Mexico's liberalization of trade over the past decade and a half makes possible. Particularly, Mexico's participation in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation efforts to reduce trade barriers stands to benefit Colima, which has the country's biggest Pacific port in Manzanillo.

The state, which aspires to be the Singapore of the Americas, wants to turn its small size and manageability into one of its main virtues. It can claim that the middle class forms the majority of its 540,000 population. It can also claim to have a higher degree of security and a lower degree of corruption than elsewhere in Mexico.

Colima is, like Singapore, a small state where all resources can be marshaled to reach agreed-upon objectives. One of the best examples of that is the University of Colima, one of eight institutions of higher learning in the state.

"The University of Colima permanently looks for the formation of human resources development in the scope of the foreign trade and the way to support the local enterprises," says Carlos Salazar Silva, president of the university.

Already in 1990, the university opened a Pacific Basin Studies Center and then added an APEC Study Center. Both of these centers focus on doing research on the Asia-Pacific regions. They contribute to the study of links between Mexico and the different APEC economies through two postgraduate programs -- Master's in Economic Relations: Asia Pacific and a doctorate on Transpacific International Relations. The university has also lent its support to a project about Mexican Pacific regional development.

But the university does not neglect other aspects of the Mexican economy. It promotes projects that get students involved in the other major trading regions -- North America, Latin America and Europe. It also exposes its students to the practices of the National Bank for Foreign Trade, Bancomext, which supports trade particularly among Mexico's small and medium-sized enterprises.

The university sees its task as an urgent one because the opening of Mexico to trade, while it has brought many benefits in the form of economic development and better quality of products, has also had its disadvantages. The entry in 1986 into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the predecessor to today's World Trade Organization, the launch in 1994 of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the conclusion from 1991 to 2002 of numerous bilateral free trade agreements has hit domestic agricultural producers and manufacturers hard and contributed to higher unemployment in many parts of the country.

While Colima's port city of Manzanillo has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country, only 1.1 percent, the port is seen as a key to economic development throughout the industrial corridor it serves and as a generator of jobs.

Development of Pacific Basin trade also offers a counterweight to Mexico's overwhelming tendency to focus on the U.S. market. Especially with the implementation of NAFTA, trade with the U.S. has become so easy -- in addition to geographic proximity, low transport costs, there is now greater market knowledge, fewer legal and contractual hurdles, and a high Hispanic population in the U.S. -- that Mexican enterprises often look no further.

The risk, according to University President Salazar, is that Mexico becomes dependent on a single market and fails to develop any export culture. The study programs at the university, combined with the development of the Manzanillo port and its supporting transport infrastructure are designed to counteract that tendency.

For that reason, the university and entire State of Colima are active participants in the APEC process. Manzanillo hosted one of the major ministerial meetings in this year's round as Mexico chairs APEC for the year.