This international workshop continues a team project that investigated the effects of the oil crises of the 1970s with a focus on Asia and Africa. The result of that project was a book published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2024, Oil Crises of the 1970s and the Transformation of International Order (Shigeru Akita, ed.).

This new project reconsiders the transformation of the international economic order in the 1980s as a study in global history. The high oil prices brought by the Second Oil Crisis in 1979 intensified stagflation, and the developing countries in Latin America and Africa accumulated debt. With the outbreak of the international debt crisis after 1982 the world economy plunged into a situation comparable to the Great Depression of the early 1930s. However, the Asia- Pacific region overcame this crisis and achieved high growth. The World Bank dubbed it the “East Asian Miracle” in 1993. How did this development come about? This research uses interdisciplinary studies spanning the fields of international relations, global economic history, Asian/African/Eastern European Area Studies, international finance, and international politics. We will use the four-layer structure theory of global history (local-national-regional-global) and bilateral comparisons and analyze the formation of the “Asia-Pacific Economy” that emerged in the mid-1980s.

DATES:  Saturday, March 23—Sunday, March 24, 2024

LOCATION: University of Washington, Seattle

VENUE: Thomson Hall, Room 317

Attendance is by invitation. Please contact organizers professors Mark Metzler or Shigeru Akita for information. This workshop is sponsored by the UW Japan Studies Program and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

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If you have any questions, please contact Ellen Eskenazi at esky@uw.edu with “March Workshop” in the subject line. Accommodation requests related to disability or health condition should be made at least ten days ahead of event date.