Japan's slow growth in the 1990s has raised concerns that Japanese political and economic institutions are not responding effectively to domestic problems and increased global competition. But Japan's stagnant macroeconomic performance masks structural changes and economic reforms now underway....

The voluntary export restraint agreement (VER) limiting Japanese exports of cars to the US is evaluated. Extending a previous article dealing with Japanese transplant auto factories in the US, the authors examine impacts of alternative responses to the VER on the micro and macro level. The VER...

In the last two decades, the electronics industry has evolved from a vertically integrated in-dustry to a vertically segmented one. This transformation has often been attributed to the modularization of electronic products. In this paper, we argue that the degree of modularity is an active...

Tourism taxes have become an important source of revenue or many tourist destinations in the USA. Among the most widely used is the hotel room tax, levied by 47 states and many localities. Room taxes are touted by proponents as a way to shift the local tax burden to non-residents, while the...

This paper evaluates factors responsible for the competitiveness of China in the world economy and relative to its East Asian rivals. China has been highly successful in capturing world export markets. Chinese competitiveness is not just a matter of an undervalued exchange and extremely low...

Empirical evaluations of trade agreements often rely on descriptive statistics or univariate time series methods to detect subsequent changes in trade flows. We conduct a more satisfactory test by evaluating an agreement in the context of a structural econometric model. Consistent with trade...

Imperfect competition models of international trade can explain differences in rates of exchange rate "pass-through" as the consequence of differences in industry structure. I evaluate such relationships for a sample of U.S. industries by regressing estimated pass-through coefficients on a...

By almost any standard, the countries of East Asia have outperformed other developing countries over the past three decades. While there is no "Asian Model" of development, there are some common threads that run through the development experiences of East Asian countries. These include an...

In this paper, we make use of a unique world electronics production data set to assess China’s upgrading trajectory in the global electronics industry. Contrary to existing studies, we find no evidence that China’s electronics production activities are more sophisticated than one would...