The papers of this volume were presented at an international conference on "The Political Economy of Trade Conflicts" in Tokyo in December 1993. The conference brought together practitioners with a long experience in trade negotiations, economists, and political scientists from Europe, Japan, and the US to exchange experiences, views, and arguments on various trade policy issues. The papers cover general aspects of EU trade policy, Japanese trade policy, EU-Japan and US-Japan relations; they address policy issues in specific conflict prone industries such as agriculture and high technology;...

In our quickly changing world, authors who are analyzing the so cial, economic, and political processes going on in different countries often find themselves in a situation where the deve lopment of processes they have already described take a turn in another direction before their work is in final form or appears in print. As a consequence, some of their statements are no lon ger valid. More rarely it occurs that after the writing of a book presenting a reform process covering 10 years (the writing itself taking one and a half years), exceptional events take place in the given country...

Access to science and technology worldwide is achieved by active participation in open international scientific research, as well as through technological capability that is decisive in catching up with world developments in science and technology. In other words, it is the "national system of innovation" which determines a country's assimilation capacity. The universities, research institutions, the technological infrastructure, industrial training schemes, information networks and technical institutions in general provide the foundation for a solid, steady development. Therefore policies...

Where development is concerned, our language and perhaps our way of thinking often ap pear somewhat distorted. If anything, the Asian economies with their most impressive and dynamic growth should logically be called developing countries. Instead, we call them threshold countries, newly industrializing countries (NICs) or newly industrializing eco nomies (NIEs), the latter term taking into account the Chinese argument that Hong Kong and Taiwan should not be considered countries. During the eighties, when Latin American NICs became the main victims of the debt crisis, the NIEs of East Asia...

Competition and cooperation between Japan, Europe and USA is the key issue of this book - both at government and business levels. Both short-term and long-termin competitive cooperation between Western and Japanese firms and institutions can be fruitful. Cooperation however, provides no easy solutions to problems which Western economies have been unable to solve on their own. Governments as well as companies are often unprepared for cooperation with Japan within the framework of larger-scale projects. On theother hand, Japan itself still lacks the leadership capacities to match its present...