Japan's macroeconomic problem has yet to be properly diagnosed. Throughout the 1990s, policy makers could not decide on the proper macro economic measures to combat the country's severe economic slump. We propose a unified explanation, with deep historical roots, of why aggregate private demand...

For more than a decade before the great crisis of 1997-98, East Asian countries pegged softly to the U.S. dollar. In the period of currency chaos from mid 1997 through 1998 with exchange depreciations in eight East Asian countries, massive deflationary pressure in dollar terms which was...

Because many authors have proposed stimulating the ailing Japanese economy by monetary expansion and yen depreciation, we explore the repercussions of depreciating the yen against the dollar on the other East Asian economies - which largely peg to the dollar. Since 1980, economic integration...

Before the crisis of 1997-98, the East Asian economies except for Japan but including China pegged their currencies to the U.S. dollar. To avoid further turmoil, the IMF now argues that these currencies should float more freely. However, our econometric estimations show that the dollar's...