Kenichi Mayer-Odrich (LSE) - 2022-23 Students
k.odrich@lse.ac.uk

“Made in Europe?” Japanese ‘transplants’, economic nationality and the European Single Market for cars, 1973-1994

Iseek to investigate how the emergence of Japanese ‘transplant’ car factories in Europe in the 1980s posed profound legal and political questions over the ‘economic nationality’ of goods manufactured by foreign-owned corporations within the European Community (EC). I intend to demonstrate how the creation of a European Single Market for cars was heavily contingent on an EC-Japan agreement in ways that complicate prevailing theories on European integration that stress intra-EC bargaining at the expense of global conjunctures. In doing so I will illuminate how political and socio-cultural factors inflected the interaction between foreign direct investment and external trade issues.

Primary supervisor: Prof. Piers Ludlow, LSE
Secondary supervisor: Prof. Antony Best, LSE