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The paper deals with the interplay of major international infrastructure initiatives, in particular China’s Belt and Road Initiative, Japan’s Partnership for Quality Infrastructure and the EU strategy on “Connecting Europe and Asia”. Their co-evolution is interpreted as the creation and further development of a new market, whose characteristics like its complexity, its properties as an international public good and its oligopolistic supply structure create interesting insights. The paper finds that initiatives have adjusted to each other, in line with expectations from a market perspective. While China’s initiative at first followed a “low-price” strategy, Japan reacted with a “quality infrastructure” approach, also winning support from multilateral fora like G7 and G20. With the Second Belt and Road Forum, China has signaled to move closer to this line as well, and the EU is pursuing a similar approach as Japan, signing a partnership agreement with it. Interpreting this interaction as an oligopolistic structure, a chaotic competitive process has so far been avoided. The contest is actually evolving towards superior solutions, raising the quality of institutional infrastructure initiatives and, hopefully, of specific projects as well.

Regional financial arrangements and monetary integration in East Asia and Europe have made considerable progress in recent years. This paper discusses whether governments in both regions, Japan and Germany as the most advanced regional economies in particular, can use the new dynamics as levers to raise their status vis-à-vis the United States. It will be argued that activities are defensive rather than offensive, aiming at protecting the respective region from financial risk. Japan, in particular, would find it difficult to raise its status vis-à-vis the United States significantly by promoting regional financial and monetary integration, principal reasons being actor heterogeneity, the role of China, hesitation to bear burden and risk, and the historical legacy of a bank-oriented system.

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It is frequently contended that as for research and development (R&D), the scientific basis of innovation, Japan has been a freerider with respect to the international community. It is generally accepted, both within and outside the country, that, be that as it may, Japan as an important "frontier economy" can no longer rest on this position (e.g., cf. Ueda, 1996, p. 22).This paper is about one possible way out of this unsatisfactory situation, i.e. (research) alliances among companies, in order to complement their weak basis of scientific knowledge in one of the most advanced fields of scientific research and most promising fields of business interest: new biotechnology. With respect to such alliances, there is always the fear that "the game is not strictly played by the rules", i.e. that one "partner" will cheat -or at least will try to cheat -the other. Does this apply to Japan, particularly if foreign companies are involved: are partners "milked", or is there a symbiotic know-how enhancement, fruitful for all participants?Alliances can be established with scientific institutions or other companies, among them potential competitors, at a national and/or an international level. As for national alliances, government-sponsored R&D consortia can play a major role. How do these relationships work and what are their results? Surveying the relevant literature, several hypotheses can be put forward. With respect to international alliances, it is frequently suggested that an uncontrolled dissemination of technological know-how from the foreign to the Japanese partner may take place, which could be a major reason for failures of co-operative ventures. On the other hand, Japanese research consortia are often seen in Western literature as an effective tool of technology creation, because of the extensive potential information exchange (cf. Audretsch,