As Japan and the Nordic countries entered the final decade of the 20th century, they experienced an abrupt end to a near decade-long rapid surge in asset prices. An era of economic optimism was transformed into recession and a difficult cleaning-up process of the financial sector started....

Timor-Leste is among the world’s poorest countries and poverty reduction is high on the country’s policy agenda. The National Development Plan emphasizes a poverty reduction strategy based on economic growth and a focus on improvements in the health and education sector. This paper describes...

This paper describes the abundance of semiconductor consortia that have come into existence in Japan since the mid-1990s. They clearly reflect the ambition of the government – through its reorganized ministry METI and company initiatives - to regain some of the industrial and technological...

We test whether predictions of the Aghion and Howitt (2004) model are supported by firm level data. In particular, we analyze if there is an inverted U-shaped relation between competition and R&D. Results show that the inverted U-shaped relation is supported by the Herfindahl index but not by...

This paper examines the East China Sea territorial and maritime dispute between Japan and China, from the re-emergence of the dispute in the 1990s until the 2010 collision between the Japan Coast Guard and Chinese fishing trawler. In the absence of the use of force, the paper provides an...