We discuss that Japan should make a comprehensive reform of the existing institutions of health insurance in view of the apparent structural problems centering on the financial instability of health care finance, and discrepancies in premiums and benefits among the insured.

This paper analyzes the rationality of Japanese macroeconomic forecasters. It finds that Japanese individual forecasters are pessimistic in boom and optimistic in recession, and that they over-react to new information. Across forecasters, the magnitude of average forecast revisions is not...

We analyse empirically the effect of uncertainty on fixed investment by estimating an accelerator-type investment function based on a panel data set of the Hapanese manufacturing firms. The uncertainty measure, represented by the conditional standard deviation of the sales ghrowth rate, is...