The University of Nottingham's Taiwan Studies Programme presents a hybrid talk by Professor Saori N. Katada, Professor of International Relations at University of Southern California and the 2022 Fondation France-Japon/Banque de France Fellow at l’École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
Japan’s Geoeconomic Strategy between CPTPP and IPEF; US-China Dynamics and implications on Taiwan
- Lunch: 12.30 to 1.30pm
- Talk: 1.30 to 3pm
Talk abstract
In the first few years of the 2020s in the middle of supply chain disruption triggered by the pandemic, contrasting economic arrangements have taken shape. On the trade front, Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) came into effect with ten ASEAN members and the five regional partners (China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand), while the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) in effect since 2018 received several new accession applicants including China and Taiwan. Being left out of both agreements, the United States proposed Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) with 13 other members around the Indo-Pacific in late May 2022 during President Biden’s visit to Asia. This framework pursues coalition building in the region with a modular approach for the participants to choose from in the four areas of economic cooperation.
Japan as the key player is caught not only between these multiple schemes, but also how to engage both the United States and China without antagonizing either. The talk examines Japan’s geoeconomic strategy of the 21st century with focus on the government’s changing role in economic statecraft, and discusses how the Japanese government balances between the overlapping initiatives to keep both the United States and China in the regional economic order and what implications it has on Taiwan’s position in the regional economic order.
About the speaker
Saori N. Katada is Professor of International Relations at University of Southern California and the 2022 Fondation France-Japon/Banque de France Fellow at l’École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Her book Japan’s New Regional Reality: Geoeconomic Strategy in the Asia-Pacific was published from Columbia University Press in 2020, whose Japanese version was published from Nikkei Business Publications in 2022. She has co-authored two recent books: The BRICS and Collective Financial Statecraft (Oxford University Press, 2017), and Taming Japan’s Deflation: The Debate over Unconventional Monetary Policy (Cornell University Press, 2018). She has her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Political Science), and her B.A. from Hitotsubashi University (Tokyo). Before joining USC, she served as a researcher at the World Bank in Washington D.C., and as International Program officer at the UNDP in Mexico City.