World Perspectives

Tariffs Rock Japan’s Election: Rice, Oil, and Autos

Japanese Prime Minister, Shigeru Ishiba has vowed to stay on as Prime Minister despite his coalition government losing its majority in the upper house after an election on Sunday. Ishiba’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) government is a coalition government with its junior coalition partner Komeito; it fell 3 seats short of maintaining a majority in the 248-seat upper house in Sunday’s vote. The coalition needed 50 seats (one half of the upper chamber seats are up every election), yet they won 47. The coalition had 140 seats going into the election, with 91 seats among the 10-party opposition and 17 seats that were unaffiliated.   A major issue in the weekend elections was the Trump Administration’s 25 percent tar...

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From WPI Consulting

Communicating importance of value-added products

Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.

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