Inward foreign direct investment (FDI) in Japan is expected to contribute to the Japanese economy, but an empirical analysis on its causes and consequences has not been widely conducted partly because of a lack of comprehensive panel data on foreign firms. This paper seeks to construct a panel...

There have been very few World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement cases based on the Agreement of the Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT Agreement). While the rulings of the <i>European Communities-Measures Affecting Asbestos and Products Containing Asbestos</i> and <i>European Communities-Trade...</i>

While the Word Trade Organization's (WTO) Technical Barriers to Trade (hereinafter "TBT Agreement") has long remained unused as a legal basis of the WTO dispute settlement, the Appellate Body made three landmark decisions in 2012: <i>US-Clove Cigarettes</i>, <i>US-Tuna II</i>, and <i>US-COOL</i>. This paper...

This paper examines <i>US-COOL</i>, which is the third, landmark Appellate Body's ruling under the Word Trade Organization (WTO)'s Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (hereinafter "TBT Agreement") and came out in 2012.The case addressed two key obligations of the TBT Agreement (i.e., Articles 2.1...

Rapid economic development in emerging economies including China has been transforming the structure of the world economy. One such phenomenon is an international struggle for resources, in which resource-endowed countries tend to resort to export restraints of resources as one of their tools....

This paper derives a new monthly index of real economic activity for Japan for the period 1960 to 2013. The index shows a similar behavior to that of the real gross domestic product (GDP). The correlation coefficient based on annual data and quarterly data is 0.94 and 0.90, respectively....

Agriculture differs from manufacturing in that leveling the workload is difficult as it deals with animals and plants. We can overcome such difficulties by taking advantage of the Japanese landscape which stretches from south to north with differing altitudes and allows different peak workloads...

In this paper, I will explain the construction and analysis of a database of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), represented by data from the Credit Risk Database (CRD), and the role of the database as a means to provide financial education to SMEs. Then, to develop "assessment"...

In 2009, the European Union (EU) introduced a regulation prohibiting the importation and marketing of seal products except for those originated from the hunts by indigenous people or from the hunts for maritime resource management. The measure relates to animal welfare as it is concerned about...

We study the impact of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake on firm dynamics and obtain implications for the recent Great East Japan Earthquake. By using unique micro-level data for a maximum of 90,000 firms, we examine the impact of the earthquake on firms' default, relocation, and investment...