The Asia–Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, whose approach is voluntary and non-binding in open regionalism, has been criticized for its alleged failure to develop a rapid liberalization process and to contribute to a greater level of intra-regional trade in the APEC region. Nonetheless, we find that APEC has been contributing to intra-regional trade creation, particularly in trade in manufactured goods as compared to trade in non-manufactured goods. This finding is robust to the various fixed-effect models and the first-differencing models which are applied to the gravity equation.