Mireya Solís
Co-Director - Center for East Asia Policy Studies
Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Center for East Asia Policy Studies
Philip Knight Chair in Japan Studies
Mireya Solís is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and holds the Philip Knight Chair in Japan Studies. She is also co-director, with Richard Bush, of the Center for East Asia Policy Studies. An expert in Japan’s foreign economic policies, Solís earned a doctorate in government and a master's in East Asian studies from Harvard University, and a bachelor's in international relations from El Colegio de México. Her main research interests include Japanese politics, political economy, and foreign policy; international and comparative political economy; international relations; and government-business relations. She also has interests in broader issues in U.S.-Japan relations and East Asian multilateralism.
A theme running through Solís’s research on Japanese political economy is an attempt to explain the coexistence of pork-barrel and state-led growth practices in Japan’s industrial policy. She also gives important attention to domestic determinants of Japan’s foreign economic policy. Her most recent research is on what she calls the single most important departure of Japanese trade policy of the last decade: Japan’s embrace of preferential trade agreements as a means of liberalizing its trade relations. Solís explores the causes and results of this policy set, and explores the on-going competition among different blueprints for regional integration—a trend which includes the United States through its leadership of negotiations toward the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Solís’s analysis includes consideration of whether free trade agreements can be an effective tool to implement the domestic structural reforms needed to enhance the competitiveness of the Japanese economy. She is also interested in exploring opportunities for closer collaboration between the United States and Japan on a variety of issues, including the development of a regional architecture by leading high-standard economic integration in East Asia.
She is the author of "Banking on Multinationals: Public Credit and the Export of Japanese Sunset Industries" (Stanford University Press, 2004) and co-editor of "Cross-Regional Trade Agreements: Understanding Permeated Regionalism in East Asia" (Springer, 2008) and "Competitive Regionalism: FTA Diffusion in the Pacific Rim" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Her most recent book, “Dilemmas of a Trading Nation Japan and the United States in the Evolving Asia-Pacific Order,” was published by the Brookings Institution Press in August 2017. She has also published numerous articles and book chapters on implications of and responses to the recent economic crisis, Japan’s domestic politics and foreign and economic policies, and East Asian multilateralism.
Affiliations:
Japan-American Student Conference, member, national advisory committee
México y la Cuenca del Pacífico, member, international editorial board
New England Journal of Political Science, member, editorial board
The Japanese Political Economy, member, editorial board
Mireya Solís is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and holds the Philip Knight Chair in Japan Studies. She is also co-director, with Richard Bush, of the Center for East Asia Policy Studies. An expert in Japan’s foreign economic policies, Solís earned a doctorate in government and a master’s in East Asian studies from Harvard University, and a bachelor’s in international relations from El Colegio de México. Her main research interests include Japanese politics, political economy, and foreign policy; international and comparative political economy; international relations; and government-business relations. She also has interests in broader issues in U.S.-Japan relations and East Asian multilateralism.
A theme running through Solís’s research on Japanese political economy is an attempt to explain the coexistence of pork-barrel and state-led growth practices in Japan’s industrial policy. She also gives important attention to domestic determinants of Japan’s foreign economic policy. Her most recent research is on what she calls the single most important departure of Japanese trade policy of the last decade: Japan’s embrace of preferential trade agreements as a means of liberalizing its trade relations. Solís explores the causes and results of this policy set, and explores the on-going competition among different blueprints for regional integration—a trend which includes the United States through its leadership of negotiations toward the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Solís’s analysis includes consideration of whether free trade agreements can be an effective tool to implement the domestic structural reforms needed to enhance the competitiveness of the Japanese economy. She is also interested in exploring opportunities for closer collaboration between the United States and Japan on a variety of issues, including the development of a regional architecture by leading high-standard economic integration in East Asia.
She is the author of “Banking on Multinationals: Public Credit and the Export of Japanese Sunset Industries” (Stanford University Press, 2004) and co-editor of “Cross-Regional Trade Agreements: Understanding Permeated Regionalism in East Asia” (Springer, 2008) and “Competitive Regionalism: FTA Diffusion in the Pacific Rim” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Her most recent book, “Dilemmas of a Trading Nation Japan and the United States in the Evolving Asia-Pacific Order,” was published by the Brookings Institution Press in August 2017. She has also published numerous articles and book chapters on implications of and responses to the recent economic crisis, Japan’s domestic politics and foreign and economic policies, and East Asian multilateralism.
Affiliations:
Japan-American Student Conference, member, national advisory committee
México y la Cuenca del Pacífico, member, international editorial board
New England Journal of Political Science, member, editorial board
The Japanese Political Economy, member, editorial board
Brookings Institution Press, August 2017
Selected for the 2018 Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize
We are all in new territory given the U.S. abdication of leadership on trade liberalization and the Trump's administration [sic] hostility to the multilateral trading system. In rescuing the TPP and finalizing the Free Trade Agreement with the European Union, Japan has delivered mega trade agreements that carry a very different meaning from when the negotiations started. They make a stand in favor of open markets, tariff elimination exercises, and codification of rules at a time when there is grave concern over the direction of the two largest economies in the world.
The economic nationalists in the White House are ascendant. The overture on TPP 11 from the Trump administration was never credible. They are demanding a "better deal" for the U.S. I cannot identify ANY country that wants to negotiate with this U.S. administration given its misguided priority of attempting to reduce trade deficits in goods with trade agreements, and how they treat existing or negotiated trade agreements as disposable. [While it has escaped criticism of its trade surplus with the U.S. so far], Japan is on the [administration's] radar.
There are important geoeconomic considerations driving a more proactive Japanese foreign economic policy. In the long term, the goal is to anchor the U.S. to the regional architecture by encouraging its return to TPP. In the medium term it is about developing cooperation among like-minded countries to tame Chinese mercantilism in areas such as excess steel capacity and forced technology transfers.