Geo-economics of the Asia Pacific; TPP, AIIB and the Trump Shock

In the contemporary Asia Pacific, great power rivalry has unfolded not only in security and military affairs, but also more prominently through economic interactions in the area of trade and investment. Hence, geo-economics, an admixture of the logic of conflict with the methods of commerce, (Luttwak 1990, 19), has become an important component of power politics in the region.
In the area of trade, despite President Trump’s withdrawal from the Transpacific Partnership (TPP) agreement in January 2017, the remaining 11 countries have managed to agree and sign the TPP-11 in March 2018. In the area of investment, China’s ambition through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is reshaping the region’s economic landscape. This talk with Proffessor Saori N. Katada focuses on these economic developments in the last five years and examines how these initiatives shape the regional economic order. 
Saori N. Katada is Associate Professor at School of International Relations at University of Southern California. She is a co-author of two new 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, forthcoming November 2018). Her single-authored book Banking on Stability: Japan and the Cross-Pacific Dynamics of International Financial Crisis Management (University of Michigan Press, 2001) received Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Book Award. She has also published six edited and co-edited books and numerous articles on the subjects of trade, financial and monetary cooperation in East Asia as well as Japanese foreign aid. She is currently working on a book manuscript on Japan’s foreign economic policy and East Asian regionalism. For her research on regionalism, she was recently awarded Asia Studies Fellow at the East-West Center in Washington, Japan Foundation Research Grant and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. She has her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Political Science) in 1994, and 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.
This event is jointly hosted by the Department of Politics, Birkbeck, the Centre for Political Economy and Institutional Studies, Birkbeck and UCL Centre for Comparative Studies of Emerging Economies