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As “APEC Week” opens today in Honolulu, here are several perspectives on what you might look for as the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation convention unfolds.

• For Honolulu, it will be a test to see whether the community lives up to its calling as The Gathering Place. The local organizers say they seek to market Honolulu as a good place for a big meeting and to do business. Honolulu will try to persuade the 17,000 to 20,000 visitors from 20 countries outside the United States that Hawaii is more than sand, sea, and sky.

They hope to do so despite the security precautions, disruption of traffic, challenges of dealing with the homeless and varied protestors, and the jacking up of hotel rates. Gregg Nakayama, chair of the organizing committee told the Rotary Club in August: “Our mission is to ‘brand’ Hawaii as a great place to do business, not just a great place to come on vacation.”

On Sunday, Honolulu International Airport was decked out to receive APEC delegates with welcoming posters, greeters, and a new, tastefully decorated corridor, complete with moving walkways, from the plane arrival gates to immigration and customs. Special lanes were set up for APEC arrivals to claim their baggage so presumably they won’t be required to cope with the airport’s surly porters.

• For APEC, which has always been long on promise but short on achievement, this meeting will be a test to see whether the organization can produce something substantive or just more windy rhetoric. Founded in 1989 at the initiative of Prime Minister Bob Hawke of Australia, the U.S. and Japan, the two biggest economies in the region, were skeptical that it was needed.

In 1993, however, President Bill Clinton added to the agenda a meeting with heads of government of APEC members. The most prominent feature of that and subsequent meetings was the gift of “national dress” to each leader. In its biggest test so far, APEC played little role in overcoming the financial crisis in 1997 known as the “Asian contagion.”

• For President Obama, this meeting, coming right after the G20 assembly of advanced industrial nations in France last week, will test his ability to recapture regional leadership and to persuade members of APEC that the U.S. is not permanently bogged down in government debt, high unemployment, and political division.

The president will meet on the sidelines with many of the visiting leaders, such as Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada and President Felipe Calderon of Mexico, two nations vital to U.S. prosperity and security; relations with them have often been neglected. The last meeting of the North American leaders was in Guadalajara in August 2009. A clue to President Obama’s priorities: He will stay on for a day after the APEC meeting to hold a political fundraiser here.

• For President Hu Jintao of China, also fresh from the G20, APEC will be another test of China’s willingness to assume a responsible role in international economics commensurate with its spectacular growth. A scholar at Beijing University, Wang Yong, who writes with the authority of the ruling Communist Party, said “the world cannot expect China to assume a particularly substantial leadership role.” (Wang wrote about China in the G20 but his assessment is applicable to APEC.)

“China is not ready to take on such a role,” he said. “The country is limited in its strength and knowledge.”

Further, China “still faces internal social problems and difficulties with efficiency and fair distribution.”

On the international scene, Wang said: “China also believes that the global economy is a fundamentally unbalanced system, characterized by the disproportionate and unchecked role of the US dollar as the main reserve currency and the worsening of European sovereign debt.”

• For Japan and Russia, the test would appear to be one of patience as neither seems destined to have a major part in this meeting.

Japan, which hosted the APEC meeting in Yokohama last year, has lost its luster as the economic leader of Asia and is paralyzed by political strife and indecision. The focus on most Japanese is on the recovery of Northeastern Japan from the triple disasters of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear leakage last March.

If Japan’s part in APEC was in the past, Russia’s is in the future as it is scheduled to be the host in Vladivostok next year. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said at the time of the APEC meeting in Sydney in 2007: “Our key task is to make use of APEC’s possibilities so that Russia could join the Asia–Pacific integration mechanisms in a most effective and efficient way. This naturally complements Russia’s national plans for social and economic development. Top priority is given to projects of intensive development of Siberia and the Far East.”

Finally, members of APEC might want to complete its name, which has been hanging unfinished for 22 years. “Cooperation” is not a noun generally associated with an organization. Should it be the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum? Or Assembly or Organization or Association or what?

How about Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Gathering? (Nice Oahu touch, that.)