The Institute for Japanese Studies presents:
"Betting on the Farm: Institutional Change in Japan's Agriculture"
Kay Shimizu
University of Pittsburgh
Abstract: Betting on the Farm takes a fresh look at the conditions for change among agricultural coops and in the Japanese agricultural sector more broadly. We explore the effects on formal and informal rules, organizations, and strategies of two sets of slow-moving structural changes that challenge many countries today: market liberalization and demographic decline and aging. With its gradually liberalizing markets and oldest population in the world, Japan is an optimal laboratory for examining these interactions. And the Japanese farm sector, where the population is shrinking and aging at rates much faster than the national average, offers us a unique laboratory for exploring these processes up close.
Kay Shimizu is a Research Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of International and Public Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research addresses institutional design and their effects on economic governance with a focus on East Asia. She is the author of Betting on the Farm: Institutional Change in Japanese Agriculture (with Patricia Maclachlan), and The Digital Transformation and Japan’s Political Economy (with Ulrike Schaede). Her current research is about the confluence of demographic change and the digital transformation in the East Asian context.
