Two projects on the history of European Economy bring Japanese researchers Mei Kudo and Ken Fujita to Villa Salviati

The Japanese researchers Mei Kudo, post-doctoral research fellow at the Institute of International and Cultural Studies at Tsuda College in Tokyo, and Ken Fujita, Associate Professor at the Department of Economics at Niigata University, visited the Historical Archives of the European Union during the last week of August as part of their projects.

The subject of the liberalisation processes undertaken in Britain and Europe and the question of policy autonomy during the Bretton Woods period has led Mei Kudo to the British National Archives, the Archives of the Bank of England, the National Archives and Records Administration of the United States and, now, the Historical Archives of the European Union. Here, she consulted documents regarding the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) and European Payments Union (EPU), and was able to draw a comparison between the different approaches both parts took to the matter, from a more market-based solution proposed by Britain, to the Europe-wide coordination set forth by the European institutions. Mei Kudo highlights as well that “this careful attitude to the capital movement and convertibility in Europe is prophetic about Europe’s later response to the increasing openness of capital movement during the turbulent years of the 60’s and 70’S, and creation of European framework of monetary cooperation.” 

“The first half century of the European Investment Bank from the view of the Global South” is the title of Ken Fujita’s project, which is devoted to the, according to him, understudied development policies set out by the European Investment Bank (EIB) in the 1960’s. Under the first Yaoundé convention in 1963, the EIB started operating in a cooperative basis to overcome the imbalances between central and peripheral regions inside Europe, but also in relation to other areas. The EIB fonds, as well as the private papers of Pierre Uri and Robert Triffin provided the researcher with documents to carry his research, which focused on the plans operated by the EIB in the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States (ACP), and more specifically, the case of project SONACO in Côte d’Ivoire.

While Mei Kudo is planning to publish her PhD thesis in the near future, Ken Fujita is working on the co-edition of the book “The global South and the International Order”, to be published in 2016. Both researchers have stated the great weight that the documents consulted in the HAEU will have on the completion of these research projects.