Japan's Post‐Fukushima Energy Policy Challenges

The Great East Japan Earthquake and the successive accidents at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station are stark reminders of the importance of energy, which is the basis of economic activity and national governance. Urgent responses have been conducted since March 11, 2011, including controlling the consequences of the nuclear accident, dealing with the short‐term power shortages, and a comprehensive review of Japan's long‐term national energy policy. Nationwide discussions and reviews of these issues are still continuing. Even today, more than 2 years after March 11, many problems remain unsolved and Japanese society has to face uncertainty and challenges about its energy future. In the current difficult situation, Japan needs to achieve “3Es (e nergy security, environmental protection, and economic efficiency)” plus “S” (safety) and “M” (macro economy protection) simultaneously, taking account of the new realities following the Fukushima accident. This paper tries to identify the energy‐related challenges that Japan has to face and tries to recommend the concept of the “energy best mix policy” for Japan, by describing the present status of energy issues in Japan and the national debate on energy policy.     

新区域主义视野下的中国区域治理:问题与反思

随着区域经济一体化的发展,区域公共问题的大量涌现,日益呼唤区域内地方政府间开展一系列双边或多边协调与合作为基本内容的区域合作。研究发现,我国区域治理不完全,区域内多元利益相关者在治理主体结构中缺位或虚位。通过新区域主义视角的评估,显示我国的区域治理实际上是缺乏治理的地方政府间合作。要促进区域经济一体化水平的提高,应该适时推动区域政府管理走向区域治理。     

PREFERENTIAL TRADE AGREEMENTS AND MULTILATERAL TARIFF COOPERATION*

Are preferential trade agreements (PTAs) building or stumbling blocks for multilateral trade liberalization? I address this question in an infinitely repeated tariff game between three countries engaged in intraindustry trade under oligopoly. The central result is that when countries are symmetric, a free trade agreement (FTA) undermines multilateral tariff cooperation by adversely affecting the cooperation incentive of the nonmember whereas a customs union (CU) does so via its effect on the cooperation incentives of members. However, when countries are asymmetric with respect to either market size or cost, there exist circumstances where PTAs facilitate multilateral tariff cooperation.     

Regulating Synthetic Securitisation Following the Global Financial Crisis

This article explores whether proposed changes to the regulation of synthetic securitisation in Australia are sufficient in light of the Global Financial Crisis. Synthetic securitisation is specifically chosen as an object of study, given the relative ease with which it can be over‐used. The article examines several theoretical problems with securitisation, which entice corporations into excessively risky behaviour. Contrary to popular belief, it is established that agency issues are not a serious problem with securitisation. Instead, managerial behavioural biases are shown to be most problematic. The article recommends stricter capital adequacy relief requirements, which would provide a disincentive for excessive risk‐taking by potentially over‐confident managers.     

Multilateral tariff cooperation under fairness and reciprocity

Abstract This paper explores the impact of fairness and reciprocity on multilateral tariff cooperation. Reciprocal countries reward kind behaviour (positive reciprocity), but retaliate against countries behaving unkindly (negative reciprocity). We demonstrate that reciprocal countries that are moderately demanding from their trading partners regarding their commercial policy can support a greater degree of cooperation than self‐interested ones. However, when only very liberal import policies are considered fair, then reciprocity could have a detrimental effect on multilateral tariff cooperation.Thus, our model provides a novel perspective on the role of expectations in trade negotiations.     

The Transnational State and the Infrastructure Push

In 2010, the G20, in cooperation with major international organisations, launched a comprehensive effort – here labelled the infrastructure push – to promote infrastructure investments around the world. Using selected transnationalised elements from historical materialism, this is explained as a transnational state initiative to secure general material conditions for capitalist growth in a manner that is profoundly shaped by power relations. The infrastructure problem was allowed to grow during neoliberalism because of the hegemony of finance; the push is a result of and reflects a weakening of finance and strengthening of industrial interests in the transnational power bloc, as well as a strengthening of the emerging economies. This potential hegemonic project has gained the support of the global labour movement, while also has been subject to serious criticism from civil society organisations, speaking for the most vulnerable subaltern social forces. The empirical analysis also shows that the transnational state in this policy area works as a flexible, networked cooperation of G20 states and leading international organisations in ongoing dialogue with non-state actors, especially transnational business. In this cooperation, the international organisations have a relatively autonomous role in line with a historical materialist understanding of state apparatuses.     

新世纪中国能源安全面临的挑战及其战略应用

维护国家能源安全是当今世界各国面临的重大课题。中国能源安全面临如下几个方面的挑战：能源需求持续增长对能源供给形成很大压力;能源对外依存度不断增大,石油安全压力增尢能源结构不合理,以煤为主的能源结构导致能效低且污染严重;等等。因此,中国要着力做好以下几个方面的工作：推进能源结构的战略性调整,将能源优质化作为中国能源发展战略的主攻方向;全面落实能源资源节约优先,推动经济发展方式转变;以多边合作为依托,以区域合作为基础,广泛开展国际能源合作;等等。     

The Socio-scientific Construction of Global Climate Crisis

This article adapts and applies a securitisation framework to produce an analytical explanation for the heightened geopolitical status of climate change over the past decade, as demonstrated by the breakthrough Paris Agreement of 2015. Rather than speech acts invoking security, the focus of this analysis is on the socio-scientific discourse of global climate crisis that emerged in the several year period leading to the 2009 COP 15 conference in Copenhagen. Two types of experts—contributory and interactional—are identified as the essential and interdependent actors that engaged in ‘crisification’, a novel crisis-based perspective on political agenda setting, in which climate crisis served as a primary discursive device employed by prominent advocates of urgent action. Contributory experts, that is, authoritative climate scientists and their institutions, together with interactional experts—non-scientist social actors who appropriated and mediated scientific data and knowledge in framing climate change as a global crisis—constituted an extended epistemic community of climate advocates. Through an array of speech acts, this extended community effectively co-constructed a convincing climate crisis discourse that consisted of quantitative data artefacts based on CO₂ concentration and global mean temperature, and qualitative invocations of existential threat to human civilisation, which contributed to the ascent of climate change on the global political agenda. In proposing crisification as a complement to securitisation, the article offers a theoretical innovation that facilitates constructivist analysis of issues framed as crises, including geopolitical problems in certain non-military sectors where crisis is a favoured label for perceived threats to core values.     

Insider and Outsider Strategies of Influence: The BRICS’ Dualistic Approach Towards Informal Institutions

ABSTRACT

The challenge of ‘emerging’ countries in the 21st century has been conducted in a much more peaceful manner than in past eras when power transitions were most commonly accompanied by war. The hallmark of this peaceful transition has been the elevation of the G20, a forum in which established and emerging powers jointly deal with global economic issues and which – despite or precisely because of its informal character – has become the prime forum for global economic governance. Significantly, however, this new openness and flexibility of the international system and its increasing informalism have not only provided an avenue for emerging powers to be integrated into the inner circle of global economic governance, but have also allowed them to set up alternative institutions. By forming their own exclusive BRICS group in parallel to their membership in the G20, emerging powers have pursued a dualistic strategy that allows them to be simultaneously institutional ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’. The article focuses on this seemingly ambiguous international behaviour and explains why the BRICS have opted for this dualistic approach. Far from being socialised into the established system, the oppositional psychology of the past has not disappeared completely.     

中国的能源安全与战略选择

随着经济的快速发展,中国对能源的需求越来越大。未来20年是中国工业化和城市化进程快速深化的阶段,能源需求将进一步增加,中国的能源供应与能源安全面临着有史以来最为严峻的挑战。为了满足中国未来的巨大能源需求,中国急需积极融入全球能源合作舞台,积极参与构建新的国际能源体系。同时,要有一套面对全球性问题的综合性能源战略,要把能源政策作为公共政策的一部分。具体地说,首先解决能源问题要采取多元化战略,尤其重视周边资源国家;其次要陆路和海洋两条腿走路,双管齐下;另外还要从贸易、投资到金融手段三者并举进行突破。     

Oil Prices: Governance Failures and Geopolitical Consequences

This article links two major areas of work on the geographies of oil: socially produced scarcity and the ‘new realities’ of oil, with wider geographical inquiries, mainly global energy governance. It explores how in the current context characterised by oversupply, power stands out as a key factor in the geopolitics of prices, the interactions amongst energy institutions, the role of supply and demand, and the preferences of the actors involved. Geopolitical approaches find a niche in the gaps left by the increasing complexities of global energy governance. In this regard, energy geopolitics may be thought of as ‘governance by other means’, an alternative to failed external energy governance solutions. The article then focuses on the consequences of the drop in oil prices on producer countries and how it will impact the major issues that dominate the literature on energy security. It concludes by stating that there is a need to rethink the geopolitics of energy security in order to incorporate the global governance institutions’ failure to facilitate cooperation as another cause of the re-securitisation of energy policies.     

New Powers and the Distribution of Preferences in Global Trade Governance: From Deadlock and Drift to Fragmentation

ABSTRACT

Existing theories make divergent predictions about the impact of new powers on the global political economy. Some argue that a more even distribution of power will erode international cooperation, while others argue that cooperation can continue with the help of international institutions to overcome collective action problems. We argue that this debate overlooks a critical determinant of the shape of power transitions: the distribution of preferences amongst the major powers. It is primarily in the context of divergent preferences that power transitions are likely to give rise to conflict. Moreover, even where preferences diverge, the gains of cooperation provide a strong incentive to continue to pursue goals through multilateralism. This situation leads to forms of institutional change unanticipated by established theories. These include deadlock in expansive multilateral fora, institutional drift as old rules cannot keep up with the changing political and economic context, and fragmentation as countries seek minilateral solutions that reduce preference diversity. We develop this preference-based, institutional argument by examining the distribution of preferences and institutional change at the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its Doha Round, where the power transition is relatively advanced.     

Berlin’s electricity distribution grid: an urban energy transition in a national regulatory context

Germany has set ambitious targets to transform its energy system from being based on fossil fuels and nuclear to renewable energies, requiring electricity grids to be upgraded. As a result there is significant public pressure in some German cities to exert greater local control over electricity distribution infrastructure. A case study approach was used to investigate contestations around ownership and governance of Berlin’s electricity distribution grid. Actors at the local level perceive the national institutional framework supporting liberalised energy markets as not designed to adapt electricity distribution grids to the challenges of the Energiewende (energy turn) and to be instead hampering investment, innovation and the involvement of local actors. By analysing politics of grid ownership and governance, and emerging tensions between a national regulatory framework and more locally bounded energy system visions, our study contributes to the emerging academic debate on urban energy transitions.     

Regional Integration and Welfare: Framing and Advocating Pro-Poor Norms through Southern Regionalisms

Regional organisations are moving away from traditional market-based goals to embrace issues of welfare, yet the role they play in social policy formation, and their contribution to the embedding of alternative approaches to development, is poorly understood. This article explores whether and how the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) advance pro-poor norms and policies in national and global governance. Whilst not coherent citizenship-centred projects of regionalism, SADC and UNASUR have developed institutional competences to address the health–poverty nexus, though their policy development practices and methods take quite different forms. Theoretically, the paper develops a framework addressing three key claims: (i) poverty and welfare need to be brought in to the study of regional governance; (ii) the agency of Southern regional organisations in the generation and diffusion of norms needs to be taken more seriously in the literature and in practice; and (iii) context matters for whether and how regional organisations provide normative leadership; act as brokers in a (re)distributive way; or as advocacy actors in a political way, enabling claims at different levels of governance.     

Piecemeal Multilateral Environmental Policy Reforms under Asymmetric Oligopoly

We develop a general two‐country model with oligopolistic interdependence in which a fixed number of firms make their output and emission decisions simultaneously. We examine the effect of multilateral reforms of emission taxes on global emission levels. With sufficient asymmetry in pollution intensities between the two countries, a proportional multilateral increase in emission tax rates can increase global emission levels. However, a multilateral equal increase of emission tax rates unambiguously reduces global emission levels. We also consider the case of free entry and exit of firms, and find a rule of multilateral reforms which unambiguously lowers total emission levels.     

Regional Cooperation and Integration in the Mekong Region

Over the past two decades, several regional cooperation programs were initiated by multilateral and bilateral donors to address concerns about the development gap in the Mekong subregion. Programs such as the Greater Mekong Subregion program of the Asian Development Bank and the Mekong–Japan Cooperation program focused first on improving physical connectivity through transport corridors, regional power development and grid connection, and telecommunications linkages, and were successful. However, as transport and trade facilitation became a priority, the weak institutional capacity of Cambodia, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Myanmar, and Vietnam resulted in a slow progress and is a major challenge to regional cooperation. Other challenges are the pressure on the use of Mekong water resources and the planned construction of mainstream dams, which could threaten the Mekong River Commission's role, the regional rivalry for energy sources, and the lack of attention to unskilled labor issues. The relations between Mekong regional cooperation programs and China are also a main issue to address if cooperation programs are not to become instruments of geopolitical rivalry.     

Are Preferential Trade Agreements with Non-trade Objectives a Stumbling Block for Multilateral Liberalization?

In many preferential trade agreements (PTAs), countries exchange not only reductions in trade barriers but also cooperation in non-trade issues such as labour and environmental standards, intellectual property, etc. We provide a model of PTAs motivated by cooperation in non-trade issues and analyse its implications for global free trade and welfare. We find that such PTAs increase the cost of multilateral tariff reductions and thus cause a stumbling block to global free trade. This occurs because multilateral tariff reductions decrease the threat that can be used in PTAs and thus the surplus that can be extracted from them. By explicitly modelling the interaction between preferential and multilateral negotiations, we derive a testable prediction and provide novel econometric evidence that supports the model's key prediction. The welfare analysis shows that the current World Trade Organization rules allowing this type of PTAs may be optimal for economically large countries, thus the model can predict the rules we observe. We also analyse alternative rules that constitute a Pareto improvement.     

Narrating Crisis,Constructing Policy: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in Syria

During crises, ideas play a decisive role in shaping radical paradigm shifts in economic governance. However, not all crises immediately produce such ‘great transformations’. Why do some ideas result in incremental rather than abrupt change after crisis? To identify mechanisms potentially explaining this variation, I conduct an exploratory process tracing of an understudied case of incremental institutional change: post-independence Syria. Competing political actors in Syria converged on identical policy responses to crisis despite their very different interpretations of its causes. Although power oscillated between these increasingly bitter rivals in the early 1950s, their ideational consensus on economic issues nevertheless led to a decade of steady institutional change that transformed previously fragile government institutions into powerful vehicles of statism. I derive from this analysis the potential causal significance of two new variables – crisis narrative and crisis response – and hypothesise that their configuration can explain variation in post-crisis patterns of institutional change. Ideas can explain not only the new direction of economic governance after crisis, but also the speed and scale of its movement.     

International and Regional Cooperation: Asia's Role and Responsibilities

Asia has emerged from the global financial crisis as an important stabilizing force and an engine of global economic growth. The establishment of the G-20 gives Asian economies the global forum that they need to both represent their interests in global governance and deliver on responsibilities concomitant with their growing weight in the global economy. The region has a host of cooperation arrangements in APEC, ASEAN+3, and EAS (East Asian Summit), all with ASEAN as the fulcrum. They are huge assets, but they need to be repositioned to relate effectively to the G-20 process and other global arrangements. They also need to comprehend the politics of the changing structure of regional power. This paper discusses the challenges that Asia faces in aligning regional and global objectives in financial, trade, and other areas of cooperation, such as climate change and foreign investment. It argues that Asia is now a critical player in the global system and has a central contribution to make in strengthening global governance and international policy outcomes. The paper sets out ways to fill gaps in regional cooperation and link the agenda for regional cooperation more effectively to Asia's new role globally. This is essential to sustain Asia's superior growth performance, correct imbalances, and support the global economic system.     

Solving the global warming problem: beyond markets,simple mechanisms may help!

This paper discusses the feasibility and performances of simple mechanisms to implement international environmental agreements in the multilateral externalities context of global warming. Asymmetric information and voluntary participation by sovereign and heterogeneous countries are key constraints on the design of those agreements. Mechanisms must prevent two sorts of free‐riding problems – free riding in effort provision and free riding in participation. As markets might fail to solve simultaneously those two problems, we construct instead a simple menu of options that trades off the provision of incentives for participating countries and the provision of incentives to participate. With such a mechanism, all countries voluntarily contribute to a fund, although at different intensities, but only the most efficient ones effectively reduce their pollution below its ‘business as usual’ level.