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The intensified geopolitical tension in Northeast Asia and the U.S.–China confrontation have shifted policy debates in Japan toward national security while the economic discussion has become thin. To regain more balanced policy talks, this paper tries to quantitatively comprehend the effect of the United States and its allies' export controls on the East Asian machinery production networks and Japan's trade performance. Major findings include the following four points: First, most of the supply chain decoupling policies by the Japanese government have been the ones to prepare for sudden interruptions of the supply of important items while decoupling policies for strategic competition are limited only in the context of the cooperation with the United States. Second, international trade statistics at the industry level do not show clear evidence of supply chain decoupling in East Asia due to the U.S. export controls, at least up to 2022. Third, however, the negative trade effect becomes visible at the product or individual firms' level, and the recent strengthening of the United States and its allies' export controls may augment the negative effect on machinery production networks. Fourth, although the scope of trade controls would expand further, the supply chain decoupling is likely to end up with a partial one. The paper claims that middle powers such as Japan must establish a well-balanced trade policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the trade restrictiveness of product-specific rules of origin (PSRs) in the comprehensive sets of free trade agreements (FTAs) for Japan and the United States, focusing on their similarities and dissimilarities. The most distinctive dissimilarities are the major PSR types and their variation among FTAs. Japan's FTAs use the selective type ("change in tariff classification [CTC] or regional value content [RVC]") most intensively. In contrast, a few U.S. FTAs use RVC and others use CTC most intensively, and the distribution of simplified PSR types appears to be almost the same among FTAs in each group. The detailed PSR types, however, are likely to be more heterogeneous and complicated in U.S. FTAs than in Japan's FTAs. Such dissimilar features are more salient in machinery sectors with dense global value chains (GVCs)/international production networks (IPNs). The quantitative estimates suggest that the selective types utilized by Japan for most machinery products are much less trade-restrictive, while certain complicated types adopted by the United States for many machinery products are substantially trade-restrictive. Our detailed investigation revealed the two countries' contrasting strategies, namely, Japan appears to aggressively utilize FTAs with less restrictive PSRs to enhance GVCs/IPNs, while the United States tends to make PSRs more restrictive and complicated in detail as a sort of disguised protection tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the impacts of COVID-19 on international production networks in machinery sectors by shedding light on negative supply shocks, negative demand shocks, and positive demand shocks. Specifically, we examined changes in trade in the trade-fall periods amid COVID-19 in 2020 using Japan's machinery trade at the most disaggregated level and decomposed them into two intensive margins (i.e., the quantity effect and the price effect) and two extensive margins (i.e., the entry effect and the exit effect). Our empirical results show that trade relationships for parts and components were robust even amid COVID-19 and that international production networks in machinery sectors were almost intact. They also demonstrate that COVID-19 brought positive demand shocks for specific products with special demand due to its nature in addition to negative supply shocks and negative demand shocks, which partially explains heterogeneous effects not only among sectors but also among products in the same sector. As of October 2020, Japan's machinery trade seems to have mostly recovered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the impact of two massive shocks on Japanese exports, the 2008-2009 Global Financial Crisis and the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, focusing on the characteristics of domestic/international production networks in machinery industries. Using monthly data for Japanese bilateral exports at the most disaggregated level, the paper decomposes the fall and recovery of Japanese exports into intensive and extensive margins. It also examines the exit and re-entry of exports using logit estimation and survival analysis. The experience after both shocks confirms the stability and robustness of production networks and the enhancing link with East Asia. However, differences between the two shocks seem to generate differential impacts on corporate behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]