1. The World Trade Organization (WTO) General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) negotiation has not resulted in any major achievements since the Telecommunication and Financial Services Agreements concluded in 1997 due to a lack of momentum in the Doha Round, concerns about free-riding, and...

This paper discusses factors that relate to the age of valid standards. Unlike patents and copyrights, standards are created without a fixed effective time set by law. A linked dataset is first prepared by connecting the technology categories of the Japanese Industrial Standards—the de jure...

This paper compares the 1995 Kobe earthquake with the more recent one in Tohoku. The impact of the recent earthquake on industrial production was much larger and long-lasting than that of the 1995 earthquake. We find that very little of this can be explained by differences in government...

Emerging green technologies are the most significant and realistic path to reducing global dependence on polluting fossil fuels while simultaneously decreasing the reliance of many countries on oil-rich regimes to meet their energy needs. However, as nations begin to rely on green energy...

This paper provides an analytical description of East Asian supply chains. The data indicate that they have become more and more centered on China. In a value-added sense, though, East Asia as a whole is running surpluses against the West. The paper then surveys evidence from a variety of...

Using industry- and micro-level data, this paper examines why Japan's productivity growth has been slow for such a long time and how it can be accelerated in the future. Japan's capital-to-gross domestic product (GDP) ratio continued to increase after 1991, which must have contributed to the...

This paper surveys research on foreign direct investment (FDI) in East Asia. The pattern of FDI in the region has changed over time. Outward FDI from Asia began in earnest when Japanese multinational corporations (MNCs) shifted production to other Asian economies following the 60% appreciation...

This paper discusses the appropriate policy mix for China in the post crisis period. As is well known, China has achieved a remarkable economic growth rate over the last 30 years using an export-led growth strategy. To implement this strategy, the Chinese authorities have pegged their currency...

This paper aims to examine three issues: how bad the productivity performance in Japan's service sector has been; why it is important to accelerate TFP growth in the service sector; and why TFP has stagnated in Japan's service sector. The main findings of the paper are as follows. First, TFP...

In this paper, we take up the Index of Donor Performance (IDP) constructed by the Center for Global Development (CGD), especially, discussing issues of selectivity and project proliferation in the IDP index. We argue theoretical issues of the Index from the aspect of the aid data characteristics.