The paper shows that between the late 1980s and 1997, the year when Korea was engulfed in a financial crisis, its corporate-sector profitability was on a decreasing trend, albeit short-term ups and downs. The evidence presented in the paper suggests that Korea’s corporate and financial sectors...

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...

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...

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...

One of the curiosities about the Japanese banking sector for Westerners is the close connection between banks and the financial authority, namely Ministry of Finance (MoF). One of the important sources of this connection is the practice called amakudari. Amakudari symbolizes the practice under...

Timor-Leste is among the youngest nations in the world. It started its independence under difficult circumstances: poverty is widespread, education is poor, the industrial sector is non-existent, and political turbulence is on the rise. On the positive side, future oil revenues are predicted to...