Yukihito Sato is Director-General of the Research Operations Department at the Institute of Developing Economies (IDE). He has been doing research on Taiwan as an IDE researcher since graduating from the University of Tokyo in 1986. He obtained his master’s degree from the Department of Economics, National Taiwan University in 1991, and his Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Economics, Kobe University in 2008.

Sato’s main research involves the political economy of industrial development in Taiwan and Asian countries.  His major work, Formation and Development of Taiwan’s High-tech Industries (in Japanese) was published by Iwanami Shoten in 2007. This book illustrates how Taiwan’s engineers created the semiconductor and personal computer industries that grew to be world players thereafter. He later on organized a project on industrial development in Asian countries with several researchers, which led to the Varieties and Alternatives of Catching-up: Asian Development in the Context of the 21st Century which he coedited with Hajime Sato, and published by Palgrave-Macmillan in 2016. This volume argues multiplicity of economic development paths followed by Asian latecomer countries.