Given former Prime Minister Koizumi s reformist zeal, agriculture might have been expected to be high on his list of targets for so-called structural reform . However, an investigation of the record of his administration on agricultural policy reveals only modest achievements in terms of policy...

‘Japan Inc.’ is manifested in the agricultural sector as a classic subgovernment consisting of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, the Liberal Democratic Party, and the agricultural cooperative organisation (Nokyo). This three-way coalition of bureaucratic, party and...

This paper empirically investigates the effects of capital injections into Japanese banks, which were based on the Financial Function Stabilization Law and the Early Strengthening Law, on the capital crunch. Using financial panel data for all of the Japanese commercial banks, we estimate dynamic...

In the past, the experience of the ‘East Asian Miracle’ and the sufferings from the ‘East Asian Meltdown’ were the impetus to generate and develop East Asian regional identity. The situation, however, is changing drastically. The future of East Asia regionalism has become amorphous...

A consolidated filing of corporate income tax may induce firms to manipulate ownership interests in subsidiaries but no study has systematically examined such behavioral responses. This paper examines empirically inclusions/exclusions of subsidiaries to/from consolidation groups in a...

This paper evaluates one of the most drastic reforms of the Japanese public health insurance started in year 2006, by numerically examining the reform in an aging Japan in a dynamic context with overlapping generations within a computable general equilibrium framework. Our simulation results are...

This paper examines the impact of price fluctuations in foreign stock markets on the stock prices of domestic banks’ stocks to explore if and how external shocks have affected the banking system in Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand during the 2000s. Some researchers insist that domestic...

The world's oil consumption has been increasing for more than a century with a few exceptions. However, there would be a possibility that the recent increase in oil consumption in developing countries such as China and India tighten the long term oil market. Since the exact amount of oil...

This paper analyses two pronounced features of Japanese corporate governance--large corporate boards almost entirely composed of insiders and the tendency to appoint CEOs through internal promotions. It is often argued that Japanese boards are less effective in monitoring CEOs than U.S. boards...