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271. The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) Negotiations: Overview and Prospects

Author:
Deborah Elms and C. L. Lim
Publication Date:
02-2012
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies
Abstract:
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a trade agreement currently under negotiation between nine countries in three continents, including Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, United States and Vietnam. In late 2011 three additional countries--Japan, Canada and Mexico--announced their intention to join as well. The TPP has always been called a "high quality, 21st century" agreement that covers a range of topics not always found in free trade agreements. This includes not just trade in goods, services and investment, but also intellectual property rights, government procurement, labor, environment, regulations, and small and medium enterprises. This paper traces the complex negotiations and evolution of the talks since the early 2000s to the present.
Topic:
Economics, Environment, International Trade and Finance, Treaties and Agreements, Labor Issues, and Intellectual Property/Copyright
Political Geography:
United States, Japan, Malaysia, Canada, Israel, Vietnam, Latin America, Australia, Australia/Pacific, Mexico, Singapore, Chile, Peru, New Zealand, and Brunei

272. Why We Still Need the World Bank

Author:
Robert Zoellick
Publication Date:
03-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Foreign Affairs
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
In 2007, the World Bank was in crisis. Some saw conflicts over its leadership. Others blamed the institution itself. When the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the cornerstone of what became the World Bank Group, was founded in 1944, poor and war-torn countries had little access to private capital. Sixty years later, however, private-sector financial flows dwarfed public development assistance. “The time when middle-income countries depended on official assistance is thus past,” Jessica Einhorn, a former managing director of the World Bank wrote in these pages in 2006, “and the IBRD seems to be a dying institution.” In roundtable discussions and op-ed pages, the question was the same: Do we still need the World Bank?
Topic:
War and World Bank
Political Geography:
Afghanistan, Japan, and Europe

273. Why Fukushima Was Preventable

Author:
James M. Acton and Mark Hibbs
Publication Date:
03-2012
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Abstract:
Public sentiment in many states has turned against nuclear energy following the March 2011 accident at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. The large quantity of radioactive material released has caused significant human suffering and rendered large stretches of land uninhabitable. The cleanup operation will take decades and may cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
Topic:
Energy Policy, Environment, Natural Disasters, Governance, and Nuclear Power
Political Geography:
Japan and Israel

274. U.S. Democracy and the Japanese American Legacy

Author:
Diane Adachi
Publication Date:
03-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Diplomatic Courier
Institution:
The Diplomatic Courier
Abstract:
On October 5, 2010, President Obama signed into legislation Congressional Gold Medal of Honors for the Nissei veterans that made up the 442 Regimental Combat Team and its 1st Battalion the 100th Infantry, the most decorated units in military history serving during the period of Japanese American incarceration.
Political Geography:
Japan and America

275. Keeping Up with an Urbanizing World

Author:
Michele Acuto
Publication Date:
03-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Diplomatic Courier
Institution:
The Diplomatic Courier
Abstract:
In 1951, Isaac Asimov, father of science fiction, opened his most famed book Foundation with a graphic portrayal of the planet that was leading an imaginary galaxy mastered by humankind in all its width. “Its urbanization, progressing steadily, had finally reached the ultimate. All the land surface was a single city.” A few years later, J.G. Ballard, in another of the columns of modern-day fictional literature, depicted a similar atmosphere in his dystopian novel The Concentration City, where the urban settlement in question encompasses everything known to its inhabitants, which cannot do anything more than accepting the view “that the City stretches out in all directions without limits.” No escape is offered to the impuissant protagonist, who travels endlessly along rail lines, only to get back to the point of origin without ever leaving a disturbing conurbation.
Topic:
Urbanization
Political Geography:
Japan

276. e-Health for Japanese Health Services

Author:
Masanori Akiyama and Ryozo Nagai
Publication Date:
03-2012
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Strategic and International Studies
Abstract:
As Japan faces rapid aging, a declining birthrate, widening income disparity, expanding fiscal debt, and remarkable hikes in health care costs, the sustainability of its health care system is at stake. Despite the need to allocate limited medical resources optimally, Japan lacks a common platform for sharing medical data, ideally over the Internet. The potential benefits of health information technology, or health IT, are not well known among patients, practitioners, or policymakers. Electronic patient records are not available from one hospital to another and are isolated from the Internet due to privacy concerns. Clinical practitioners have no remote access to patients' information when away from a particular hospital or clinic. Unique medical data, stored individually in each hospital or clinic, is vulnerable to accidents and natural disasters. The Tohoku disaster demonstrated the absence of a reliable backup for health data, the challenge of data management during an emergency, and the dangers of prescribing drugs with insufficient access to medical records.
Topic:
Demographics, Health, and Science and Technology
Political Geography:
Japan and Israel

277. Editor's Foward

Publication Date:
03-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Affairs
Institution:
School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University
Abstract:
In its sixty-five-year history, the Journal of International Affairs has explored some of the most important transformations of the postwar world: from the U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan to the collapse of the Soviet Union, from democratization and development to the explosion of global trade. The unprecedented—and accelerating—growth of cities today will prove to be no less important. Mass urbanization will have a transformative effect on the political, economic and social fabrics of societies around the world. The demographic shift from rural to urban areas promises to release untapped human potential—creative and productive energies that will emerge from the increased exchange of ideas and capital.
Topic:
Development
Political Geography:
United States, Japan, and Germany

278. Japan's response to the changing global order: the case of a 'Gaggle of Gs'

Author:
Hugo Dobson
Publication Date:
05-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
Over recent years, media, academic, and policy-makers' attention has focused on changes in the global order from a unipolar to a multipolar world. The emergence of the Group of 20 (G20) since 2008 as the 'premier forum for international economic cooperation', which includes a number of developed and developing countries, and its 'eclipse' of the Group of 8 (G8) summit are acknowledged as some of the most salient symptoms of this shift. This article takes the intensive period of 'G' summitry between 2008 and 2011 as a pertinent case study to begin to explore the concrete responses of key protagonists to this reconfiguration of the architecture of global governance specifically and thereby the recent shift in the global order more broadly. In the specific case of Japan, widely assumed to be a declining power, the article highlights both consistency and change in the responses of and strategies employed by Japanese policy-makers within 'G' summitry. Various theoretical positions can account for this to differing degrees which also bring into relief the ultimately contradictory trajectory of Japan's response to the changing global order.
Topic:
Disaster Relief
Political Geography:
Japan

279. Debating Japan's intervention to tackle piracy in the Gulf of Aden: beyond mainstream paradigms

Author:
L. Black
Publication Date:
05-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
The literature on Japan's international security policy, including overseas interventions, since the end of the Cold War has focused on Japan's emergence as a 'normal' state. This discourse is informed by realist theory, which posits that states aim to increase their material power to secure themselves in a hostile anarchical order. This article explores the maritime security role of the Japan Coast Guard (JCG) to elucidate alternative theoretical paths that shed new light on Japan's foreign interventions. Specifically, a critical constructivist approach is applied to demonstrate the unique maritime security responsibilities that the JCG has assumed in line with Japan's pacifist identity and even at the expense of the Maritime Self-defence Forces, as demonstrated in Diet debates on Japan's Anti-Piracy Measures Bill in April 2009. Rather than pressuring states to become 'normal', there is much to be gained from understanding how identities inform alternative approaches in International Relations.
Topic:
Security
Political Geography:
Japan

280. Japan's Middle East policy: 'still mercantile realism'

Author:
Yukiko Miyagi
Publication Date:
05-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
Japan's vital interests, both its energy security and US alliance, are at stake in the Middle East. Change in Japan's Middle East policy is charted over three periods, from a stance independent of the United States to one increasingly aligned with US policy. This is explained in terms of four variables: level of US hegemony, threats in East Asia, energy vulnerabilities in the Middle East, and normative change inside Japan. Japan's policy in Middle East/North Africa reflects its general move toward a more militarily enhanced version of mercantile realism.
Political Geography:
United States, Japan, Middle East, and East Asia