Japan and East Asian Integration: Trade and Domestic Politics

For almost fifty years Japan pursued a single-track approach focusing trade negotiation efforts exclusively on the global multilateral forum while shunning regionalism as harmful to the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs/ World Trade Organisation system. However, following the tsunami disaster of March 2011 and widespread economic downturn Tokyo has engaged much more actively in pursuing bilateral Free-Trade Agreements (FTAs). This book explores the turnaround in Japanese strategy and trade policy. Drawing on case studies and including interviews with FTA policymakers within the government and key interest groups it focusses on the domestic political process of FTA and Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations to investigate the cause of the policy shift. This work will prove useful to students, scholars and policymakers interested in international political economy, Japanese trade policy, East Asian regionalism and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).