ABSTRACT
Economic multilateralism played a central role in Japan’s post-Second World War economic growth. After decades of pursuing trade liberalization on an exclusively multilateral basis through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), however, Japan began to explore the option of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) in the late 1990s. A number of changes in the global, regional and national economy help to explain this shift. At the global level, slow progress at the World Trade Organization (WTO) pushed developed economies to find alternative ways of expanding market access for their exporters. At the regional level, Japan’s rejection of binding liberalization in the Early Voluntary Sectoral Liberalization Talks in 1998 made Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) less viable as a vehicle for regional liberalization. And following the Asian financial crisis in 1997-98, Japan also became more willing to explore regional projects that excluded the USA and more anxious about the growing regional profile of the People’s Republic of China. Finally, at the national level, reformist policymakers saw PTAs as a way to help to extricate Japan from the years of economic stagnation that followed the collapse of the bubble economy of the late 1980s.1
