Rapidly rising local government debt in Japan presents a nontrivial addition to the central government debt. The planned replacement of the approval system for local government bor- rowing by a 'consultation system' in FY 2006 does not remove the implicit central govern- ment guarantee for local...

The Japanese Fiscal Investment and Loan Progam (FILP) will be fundamentally changed in April 2001. We are comparing the pre- and post-reform Japanese system with the German system of policy-based finance and we have found that the German system is quite different. In the case of the...