As part of our Helmut Schmidt Lecture, we have awarded our first BKHS Fellowship, which is closely linked to the lecture’s theme, ‘For a just democracy’. Data analyst and economist Dr Aya Adachi is the new research fellow on the team at the Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt Foundation (BKHS).
During her fellowship, Adachi is investigating how China’s overcapacity and the resulting trade surplus since 2019 have influenced global inequality, particularly in the relationship between developed and developing countries. She is analysing the impact of Chinese exports on industrial development in emerging economies, as well as these countries’ growing dependence on Chinese intermediate goods. The aim is to gain insights that can contribute to the development of strategies to mitigate potential negative effects on the global economic structure and to discuss policy implications for the EU.
Dr Aya Adachi specialises in economic security, geo-economics and risk mitigation strategies. Her work focuses on analysing the foreign economic policies of the EU, Germany, China and Japan, with a particular emphasis on their engagement with the Indo-Pacific and the Global South. She employs both data analysis and qualitative research methods in her work. Adachi previously worked at the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) and regularly served as an external adviser on regional economic cooperation for the German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ). Whilst working on her doctoral thesis, she was a visiting scholar at Waseda University and the German Institute for Japanese Studies (Max Weber Foundation) in Tokyo, as well as at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou (China). Adachi obtained her PhD from Ruhr University Bochum. She studied International Relations, East Asian Economics and Politics, and Mandarin Chinese at the University of Groningen, Ruhr University Bochum and Zhejiang University of Technology.
With a focus on ‘International Trade Policy and Social Inequality’, she is a Fellow at the BKHS and is directly involved in our programme area ‘Global Markets and Social Justice’.