The Keio Mita Campus has had a large number of researchers in international economics in the Faculty of Economics, the Faculty of Business and Commerce, and Keio Economic Observatory and has by now grown up as one of the largest research clusters of international economics in Japan and East Asia. To further enhance our research activities, we now decide to establish the Center for International Economics under the Institute for Economic Studies.

Since the mid-1980s, rapid globalization has proceeded, particularly in East Asia. As Richard Baldwin vividly depicted, “the second unbundling,” i.e., the international division of labor in terms of production processes or tasks, has proliferated, and we have observed “the great convergence” of relative income between developed and newly developed economies. As the era of slow international trade mainly in raw materials and finished products has ended, parts and components have dominated international trade, and not only goods but also services, capital, technology, ideas, human resources, and others have started moving across national borders.

Once new technologies are invented and novel business models emerge, we should not hesitate but actively take advantage of them. To do so, it is necessary to design and implement economic policies in order to back up rapid changes in the economy and the society. In developed economies, to sustain economic dynamism, industrial adjustments as well as the replacement and upgrading of human resources are required. In newly developed and less developed economies, the rewriting of the whole development strategies is inevitable.

In such an era of globalization, international economics that combines theory, empirics, and policy studies should play an important role. It is also important to work together with neighboring academic fields such as development economics, new economic geography, industrial organization, labor economics, and others. We must promote international research collaboration further and contribute to the academic and semi-academic literature in the world. The Center will place international economics at the core and work as a creative forum.

We hope that a lot of researchers, domestic and international, would join and collaborate our research activities.