TOKYO, May 23 (AFP) - Asia-Pacific business leaders meeting here Sunday told the region to knock down trade barriers faster and to open up investment in response to the Asian financial crisis. Industry leaders from 21 economies represented in the business advisory council of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum issued a statement urging improvements. APEC economies have pledged to free up trade across the region by 2020, with the most advanced members liberalising 10 years earlier. Each member has an action plan which is reported annually. But the plans offered by APEC members, which include the United States, Japan, China, Russia, Mexico and key Southeast Asian nations, "are often too vague to be useful to business," the council said. Victor Fung, chairman of the Hong Kong Trade Development Council, told a news conference the trade plans needed "very specific milestones on how economies are going to achieve their goals. "The plans are still not specific enough and I think we need more transparency in terms of making sure that the plans are more easily comprehensible in businessmen's language," he added. Fung is co-chairman of a committee monitoring the APEC plans to lower trade hurdles. "It is especially important to focus on investments this year because of the Asian currency crisis," Fung said after the business advisory council's three-day meeting here. Liberalising rules to make investment more stable and transparent was important, he said, and the APEC members should "bind themselves to commitments in this regard." Business leaders felt tariffs were "still a significant area of concern and they need to be reduced, especially in peak tariffs," Fung said, also urging more work on cutting non-tariff barriers. In services, he added, it was "very important for economies to actually have a level playing field in terms of treating domestic companies on an equal footing with foreign companies." Gary Burkhead, US vice chairman of FMR Corp. Fidelity Investments, said business leaders pored over how to develop an Asian debt market to improve access to capital. The executives believed the priority was dealing with bad debt, he said, and their recommendations dealt both with reorganising companies and pumping more capital into banks. "Beyond that, we have proposed a series of steps that would create a more workable long-term framework for the development of local debt markets," he told the same news conference. Recommendations included developing the rights of creditors, improving transparency and accounting, firming up laws and regulations and seeking a level playing field in terms of taxes, Burkhead said. Japan last week proposed a credit-guarantee scheme for up to two trillion yen (17 billion dollars) in bonds issued by other Asian countries, to develop the region's debt market. Timothy Ong, deputy chairman of Brunei's National Insurance Co. Berhad, who is co-chair of the business council, said the meeting sought to address the "need for workable access to capital." Business executives, whose recommendations go to APEC leaders before their September summit in New Zealand, examined the "need to restore and strengthen domestic banking systems, the need to promote foreign investment" and the need to find the right rules and standards, Ong said. The corporate chiefs did not explicitly discuss the Asian crisis as a whole, said Hong Kong's Fung, but he believed the region had "bottomed out although recovery in a sustained basis is not all that evident."  