Germany to seek closer economic ties with Japan amid give chain tension

TOKYO, March 17 (Reuters) – German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will touch down in Japan on Saturday with six of his ministers browsing for closer economic ties, as he considers minimizing German dependence on Chinese raw elements amid worldwide give chain tensions.

Scholz and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida are arranging a “government consultation” involving a quantity of cabinet members from every nations to go more than solutions to secure economic security.

“As democracies and as hugely industrialized, export-oriented economies, Japan and Germany face comparable challenges in shaping the digital and ecological transformation and strengthening the resilience of their economy in difficult geopolitical occasions,” Franziska Brantner, state secretary in Germany’s economy ministry, told Reuters.

Supplied Japan’s passing of a bill on economic security, Berlin hopes to study its raw material tactic and take Tokyo’s cue on how to lower dependency on imports, a German government official described of the cease by.

In a move largely focused at China, Japan’s parliament passed an economic security bill final year aimed at guarding technologies and reinforcing critical give chains.

Trade involving Germany and China rose to a record level final year, producing the Asian nation Germany’s most very important trading companion for the seventh year in a row regardless of political warnings in Berlin about excessive dependence.

Goods worth about 298 billion euros had been traded involving the two nations in 2022, up about 21% from a year prior to, according to info from the German statistics workplace.

Japan is Germany’s second greatest trading companion in Asia behind China, with volumes reaching about 46 billion euros in 2022.

Worried about Germany’s dependence, the centre-left government is now taking a tougher line towards Beijing than its centre-acceptable predecessor and is exploring solutions to wean itself off China’s economy.

Reporting by Sakura Murakami in Tokyo and Riham Alkousaa in Berlin Editing by Alex Richardson

Our Needs: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.