Japan and the Nordic countries similarly experienced a serious collapse of the Bubble economy in the early 1990s, but the financial recovery of the former is extremely delayed compared with the latter. In Japan, the Ministry of Finance is often accused of this, with the claim that it has acted...

Southeast Asia’s traditional export of relatively low-skilled products is facing increased competition. There is therefore a general need to upgrade production in the region, which requires a more skilled and educated labour force. Historically, education has not been emphasized in Southeast...

Technological governance has only been partially successful for technological upgrading in the five ASEAN countries discussed, with the exception of Singapore. This is a reflection of the fact that FDI is poorly integrated in local and national structures which severely limits the spill-over...

Numerous studies on firm-level data have reported higher average wages in foreign-owned firms than in domestically-owned firms. This, however, does not necessarily imply that the individual worker’s wage increase with foreign ownership. Using detailed matched employer-employee data on the...

The substantial institutional and organisational changes in Japan that followed the Meiji Restoration of 1868 have often gone down in history as an unmitigated success story. The objective of this paper is to analyse the course of the Meiji reform process to indicate how far it might offer any...

In light of an increased focus, in Japanese diplomacy since the turn of the millennium, on the need for strengthening democracy and human rights within ASEAN, this paper examines Japanese Official Development Assistance (ODA) to ASEAN during the 21st century in order to understand if Japan has...