EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Japan’s Foreign Economic Policy Strategies and Economic Performance

Peter Drysdale and Shiro Armstrong

AJRC Working Papers from Australia-Japan Research Centre, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University

Abstract: The economic rise of Japan in the 1980s was underpinned by commitment to catching up through domestic reform and accommodated externally within the framework of the postwar multilateral institutions like the GATT/WTO. Regional cooperative processes like APEC later complemented that framework, encouraging unilateral reform across the region. Following the bursting of the asset bubble in the early 1990s and the onset of the Asian Financial Crisis, Japan turned from reliance on the multilateral system to policies based on preferential bilateralism in trade policy to secure its regional trading interests. Japan’s bilateral trade agreements have been largely ineffective in supporting the kind of deep-seated reform to regulatory institutions and competition policies needed to sustain long-term productivity growth. The evidence suggests that Japanese productivity has underperformed against its peers in the industrial world and Asia. Instead of using foreign economic policy as an instrument of domestic reform and productivity enhancement Japan has used bilateral deals largely as political and strategic tools. Re-establishing a link between Japan’s domestic reform agenda and its economic diplomacy is important for structural reform and national economic success, as is a more sure-footed engagement with China.

JEL-codes: F14 F15 F55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int and nep-sea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://crawford.anu.edu.au/pdf/ajrc/wpapers/2014/201406.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:csg:ajrcwp:1406

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in AJRC Working Papers from Australia-Japan Research Centre, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Akira Kinefuchi (akira.kinefuchi@anu.edu.au this e-mail address is bad, please contact repec@repec.org).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:csg:ajrcwp:1406