Hello from Tokyo, where the weather is beautiful but the Covid-19 situation is not. Japan has maintained a delicate balance until now, controlling the pandemic without closing schools or shops, but the arrival of variant strains is making that more difficult. With less than 1 per cent of the population vaccinated, new “state of emergency” restrictions are expected soon. That will keep the economy subdued in the second quarter.

One person who has been inoculated is Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, who got his jab early so he could travel to Washington last week for a summit with US president Joe Biden. One of the outcomes of that meeting was a new Competitiveness and Resilience partnership, which includes a series of measures aimed at technology supply chains, and is the subject of today’s note.

When former US president Donald Trump launched his trade wars in the period between 2016 and 2020, some economists feared it would harm the complex supply chains that bring components from across Asia to assembly lines in China, and turn them into US-designed technology products such as the iPhone. So far, however, those fears have not come to pass.