(Repeats item 1st published on Friday with no modifications to text)
TOKYO, March 17 (Reuters) – German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will touch down in Japan on Saturday with six of his ministers in search of closer financial ties, as he considers decreasing German dependence on Chinese raw supplies amid worldwide provide chain tensions.
Scholz and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida are organizing a “government consultation” involving various cabinet members from each nations to go over approaches to safe financial safety.
“As democracies and as extremely 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 tough geopolitical occasions,” Franziska Brantner, state secretary in Germany’s economy ministry, told Reuters.
Provided Japan’s passing of a bill on financial safety, Berlin hopes to study its raw material technique and take Tokyo’s cue on how to reduce dependency on imports, a German government official stated of the go to.
In a move mostly focused at China, Japan’s parliament passed an financial safety bill final year aimed at guarding technologies and reinforcing crucial provide chains.
Trade involving Germany and China rose to a record level final year, generating the Asian nation Germany’s most critical trading companion for the seventh year in a row in spite of political warnings in Berlin about excessive dependence.
Goods worth about 298 billion euros have been traded involving the two nations in 2022, up about 21% from a year just before, according to information from the German statistics workplace.
Japan is Germany’s second biggest 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-correct predecessor and is exploring approaches to wean itself off China’s economy. (Reporting by Sakura Murakami in Tokyo and Riham Alkousaa in Berlin Editing by Alex Richardson)