ABSTRACT
Japan was the principal beneficiary of the post-war liberal international economic order (LIEO) and the future viability of its economy will depend on whether the principle of easy access to foreign markets is preserved. The importance of this becomes obvious when we consider the structure of Japanese tade. The near-total lack of raw materials domestically has forced a reliance on foreign sources of supply which could only be financed through foreign exchange earned from export trade. Commenting on this vertical nature of Japanese trade, Krause and Sekiguchi wrote that
Even though Japanese growth in the main has not been export led in the analytical sense, it does not mean that exports were
unimportant to growth. Export expansion has been of strategic importance principally because it has financed the growing import of raw materials and capital goods that embody new technology.1
