Economics, Politics and Public Policy in East Asia and the Pacific
Author: Anthony V Rinna, Sino-NK
Seoul–Tokyo relations under Japan’s new prime minister Fumio Kishida are off to a less-than-promising start. This is no doubt frustrating for the United States, eager to foster reconciliation between two major Indo-Pacific partners.
Author: Keiichiro Kobayashi, Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research
As COVID-19 cases began to mount in Japan in February, it became clear that the government needed to respond with strong policy measures. It was crucial to increase testing capacity and adopt isolation measures to contain the virus and allow economic activity to resume quickly. The Japanese government needed to set and clearly announce a timeline and numerical targets for testing capacity and medical care provision. Read more…
Author: Tom Corben, Pacific Forum
Last month, Japan’s Defence Minister Taro Kono made the sudden announcement that Tokyo was abandoning plans to deploy two Aegis Ashore missile defence batteries to sites in northern and southern Honshu. Kono cited significant cost overruns and technical difficulties associated with the trajectory of debris from the system’s booster phase as the core rationales behind the decision.
Author: Craig Mark, Kyoritsu Women’s University
The first female governor of Tokyo, Yuriko Koike, was easily re-elected in the gubernatorial poll on 5 July, winning 59.7 per cent of the vote from a 55 per cent turnout. Koike defeated a divided field of a record 21 opposing candidates, securing another four-year term in office. Read more…
Author: Shiro Armstrong, ANU
Australia and Japan have been among the global front runners in managing the COVID-19 health crisis and are positioned to lead the lifting of economic restrictions and economic global recovery, if they are able to contain second wave outbreaks of the pandemic. Read more…
Author: Shujiro Urata, Waseda University
COVID-19 is exposing the vulnerability of global value chains (GVCs). GVCs contribute to rapid economic growth by enabling multinational corporations to increase their efficiency through fragmented, task-based specialisation. But they are now quickly spreading the negative economic impacts of COVID-19 from China to many other countries. Read more…
Author: Helen Macnaughtan, SOAS University of London
Japan’s path to hosting the Summer Olympics has had more than its fair share of twists and turns. The Tokyo 1940 Olympics were cancelled. Since their inception in 1896 the Olympics have been cancelled only three times: 1916, 1940 and 1944, all in wartime. The Games have weathered political boycotts and acts of terrorism, but in 2020 they have been postponed for the first time because of a pandemic.
Author: Takashi Oshio, Hitotsubashi University
At the end of May, the Japanese government delivered a much larger than expected second supplementary budget, worth 6.2 per cent of GDP (31.9 trillion yen or US$291 billion). Combined with the first supplementary budget (5 per cent of GDP at 25.7 trillion yen or US$234.5 billion), the total fiscal stimulus in response to the COVID-19 shock now amounts to over 11 per cent of Japan’s GDP — the largest in decades. The new package is aimed at extending defensive steps for the most affected individuals and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Read more…
Author: Hiroaki Richard Watanabe, University of Sheffield
Despite its ‘high-tech’ image, Japan is in many ways relatively ‘low-tech’. While companies and governments in many countries shifted to ‘telework’ or ‘work from home’ to cope with the spread of COVID-19, many Japanese companies and government offices have been unable to adapt. Read more…
Author: Naoto Kan, Tokyo
COVID-19 quickly spread worldwide from the end of 2019. While some countries are seeing a decline in transmission and are relaxing restrictions after almost six months of disruption and uncertainty, there are still no signs of an end to the emergency in many countries. Meanwhile, the global economic impact of the virus is worsening, and there is concern that the number of suicides linked to economic collapse will increase. Read more…
Author: Sayuri Shirai, Keio University
Japan’s economy has experienced three consecutive shocks over the past year-and-a-half. The first shock struck Japan in early 2019 when the US–China trade war and slowing economic growth adversely affected Japan’s manufacturing sector. This economic effect was exacerbated by a second demand shock caused by the consumption tax hike from 8 to 10 per cent on 1 October 2019. Just as Japan’s economy was recovering, a third shock caused by COVID-19 dealt the most severe blow, plunging Japan into a full-blown recession. Read more…
Author: Fumiaki Kubo, University of Tokyo
Many are insisting that we are seeing a new world order emerge in the current COVID-19 pandemic. But in East Asia there are a number of reminders that we still live, at least partly, in the same world of geopolitics with a high level of tension. Read more…
Authors: Sarah A Son, Sheffield University and Juliette Schwak, Franklin University Switzerland
As the COVID-19 pandemic progresses, countries are investing in strategic narratives to tell the world their version of the crisis and present themselves as safe, efficient and reliable actors. South Korea and Japan — two early victims of the virus — are no exception to this trend. Yet their efforts to broadcast the success of their approaches in managing COVID-19 are succumbing to both countries’ tendency to draw direct critical comparisons with one another.
Authors: Peter Drysdale, ANU and Chatib Basri, University of Indonesia
As the world contemplates the savage impact of the COVID-19 virus on the global economy, there’s need to seize initiative in global cooperation to escape the slump caused by the health lockdown. International economic cooperation will be vital to managing the crisis and to supporting the recovery through trade, stabilising markets, faster reopening of business supply chains and international travel. Without it, the world is facing a prolonged health crisis and lasting economic stagnation on a scale not seen since the Great Depression.
Author: Nobuaki Hamaguchi, Kobe University
The United States and Europe tend to associate South America with Amazon rainforest burning, pink-tide leftist ideology, drug trafficking, corruption and illegal migration. These issues oppose their values of justice, social stability and global order. For China, whose 2016 Policy Paper on Latin America and the Caribbean states a position of ‘non-interference in each other’s internal affairs’, these are not of concern.
